Published: January 12, 2007 11:15 pm            

Speaker highlights good side of crows

Dr. Kevin McGowan wanted to show people the good side of crows at his lecture Friday night at Indiana State University.

“Living with crows is a lot like living with my dog or my relatives,” McGowan said. “There are lots of things that annoy me about them, but on the whole the relationship is positive and I’m glad they’re around.”

His lecture, “The American Crow: Not Just Another Pretty Songbird,” was part of “CrowFest 2007,” sponsored by ISU’s College of Arts & Sciences, the University Art Gallery, the Wabash Valley Animal Hospital, ISU’s department of Ecology and Organismal Biology and the West Central Indiana Bird Club.

“CrowFest” is a four-day event that also features the “Crow Show,” an exhibition of crow art in mixed media at the ISU Turman Art Gallery. The exhibit runs through Feb. 2.

The Wabash Valley Audubon Society will also lead a group crow viewing tonight. Participants should meet in the parking lot of the Vigo County Public Library at 5:20 p.m. before proceeding as a group to viewing sites to see the crows.

McGowan, who has studied crows for the past 25 years, is the director of the ornithology lab at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

About 50 people attended the lecture to learn more about the animal that has spent a lot of time in the news recently.

Justin St. Juliana, 26, a doctoral student in the Ecology and Organismal Biology department, said he and his friends go to a lot of campus lectures, but this one was special because “crows have been very popular in the news lately, or unpopular.”

A family side was presented about the crow during McGowan’s PowerPoint presentation as well as its migrating habits and its tie to the West Nile Virus.

“It’s not all about gangs and big flocks and stuff,” he said.

When it comes to crows, people either love them or hate them, McGowan said.

The presentation showed that crows don’t kick their young out of the nest like most birds and when they are at home they forge together, guard each other and take care of each other.

He pointed out that if the reason a person hates them is because they eat baby birds then those people should hate chipmunks also with a slide title, “Chipmunks: The Real Killers.”

“Chipmunks are the terror of the baby bird world in the eastern United States,” and they eat more baby birds than crows, he said.

It’s very rare that crows eat baby birds, McGowan said.

Sally Gross, a member of the West Central Indiana Bird Club, came from Montezuma to hear the lecture so she could learn more about crows.

She said she doesn’t favor poisoning the crows to get rid of them, which was proposed by the city late last year because animals that eat crows would be poisoned too and it’s a “cruel and inhumane death.”

“We would end up killing things we weren’t intending to kill,” Gross said.

Terre Haute isn’t unique because there are lots of other cities that have crows come into town to roost for the winter, and crows have been getting together in large groups for as long as there have been crows.

What’s new, McGowan said, is that the crows are coming into towns, which they have been doing for 20 to 25 years.

“Dealing with a crow roost is something like shoveling snow or mowing the lawn, you can do it but you’re going to have to do it again,” McGowan said. “ … It’s no, say ‘OK, I’ve shoveled my sidewalk. I’m done for the winter.’ It doesn’t work that way.”

There are towns in New York that budget money every year for crow prevention, such as pyrotechnics to harass them into going away, he said, noting Auburn, N.Y., which is known for the largest successful move of a roost without killing one crow.

It comes down to being prepared, McGowan said.

“Whatever attracted them here in the first place is still probably going to be here, so you’ll still have to try to dissuade them in future years,” he said.

Crystal Garcia can be reached at (812)231-4271 or crystal.garcia@tribstar.com.

        

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