Decked in black cloaks with velveteen sheen, they
begin stalking campus at dawn. Hopping from shadow to shadow, their cries can
be heard from treetops and rooftops until dusk. Ninjas? Assassins? It’s worse;
crows.
Following the deathly definition
of murder most people think of when they hear the word, The American Heritage®
Dictionary of the English Language defines murder as “A
flock of crows.” An alternate definition states that murder is “Something that
is very uncomfortable, difficult, or hazardous.” Unfortunately, Santa Clara has
both of these definitions on its hands.
According to Gary Vargas, Supervisor of Landscaping
And Events on campus, these crows are damaging property and costing his workers
an incredible amount of time and labor. After touring the grounds with Vargas,
it became evident exactly where the crows had been, following a trail that led
to stop after stop of destruction.
The campus is almost always full of bright colored
flowers during the winter quarter and through the spring— the landscape workers
plant these annual flowers twice per year. But the crows have discovered that
the flowers are a gateway to an easy breakfast.
For the past two years during the fall/winter season,
the crows have caused problems. Nelio Barcelos, a landscaper for the university
for the past 22 years, has noticed a significant increase in the occurrence
this year. Barcelos said that it has become a daily problem.
“I sometimes plant the same area twice in one day to
find the problem again in the morning,” Barcelos said. The roots embedded into these plots were
ripped out of the ground, and pockets where they used to be planted littered
the dirt.
But it wasn’t the roots that the tar-colored birds
were after—it was the worms that live underneath them. Somehow, these crows
discovered that if they pulled the flowers out of the ground, it left a nice
little cup they could reach their beaks into. Instead of having to dig and search
for the worms, they simply had to pull a bulb up and the tasty treat would be
waiting, unprotected, for them to devour.
The areas most affected by the damage were in front
of the mission church, behind it in the mission gardens, and between the McLaughlin
and Walsh dorms. “We even had California Green, an independent landscaping
company, come in to do a minor project planting specialty flowers for St.
Claire’s garden,” Vargas said. “But as soon as they were finished and had gone,
the crows swooped in and started up again as if nothing had happened.”
Vargas has devised a new strategy to defend against
these plumaged pillagers. He has bought his landscapers new flowers, this time
with a larger, denser soil-base attached. The hope is that these new plants will
be too heavy to lift for the birds. This would force them to move on to an
easier system of gathering, preferably off campus.
The Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society is a
non-profit whose “Mission is to preserve, to enjoy, to restore and to foster public
awareness of native birds and their ecosystems, mainly in Santa Clara County.”
In their most recent bird-count, conducted Dec.18 of last year, San Jose alone
recorded 1450 crows and the collective south bay tallied over 3400.
These numbers are surprisingly high, especially
considering how intelligent and potentially destructive the crows can be. One
can only pray that the horror of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds stays in the fiction of early 1960s San Francisco, and doesn’t
migrate to Santa Clara.
By Michael Rosa
