Crows everywhere, and Sunnyvale’s going to do something about it

Every day at dusk, a murder of cawing crows descends on downtown Sunnyvale, shrouding the sky over the main strip in darkness like a black cloud.

With shrewd precision they swarm from tree to tree, swooping down above the heads of startled diners on Murphy Avenue’s outdoor tables.

Like many Bay Area communities, the city has a burgeoning crow population. But in Sunnyvale, they’ve become such a nuisance that crows are now the second most common complaint Vice Mayor Alysa Cisneros hears from residents, right behind speeding drivers.

She and the city have finally had enough of the birds.

So later this month, the city is rolling out a crow abatement pilot program. Which means a worker will point a $20 handheld laser at the crows, hoping to scare them away.

“I live downtown and my complex abuts the Caltrain tracks and so that’s a noise issue, but often the crows that are immediately outside of the apartment are a larger noise nuisance,” Cisneros said.

And, it’s not just the crow’s caws that have some folks at their wit’s end. The birds have staked out residents’ lawns throughout the city, roosting in trees overnight and leaving benches and sidewalks covered with feathers and bird poop.

Sunnyvale resident Ken Ibbs has watched the city’s crow problem explode in the last decade — especially downtown where the birds often pull trash out of the garbage cans. Despite previously working as a laser scientist, Ibbs only recently discovered he could use the tool of his trade to scatter the crows from the trees in his backyard.

“The reason it frightens them away is the same reasons it’s useful for giving seminars,” Ibbs said. “It looks very bright. Green is particularly bright for things like crows. They have much more visual acuity.”

Sunnyvale isn’t the only city dealing with black clouds of crows. Crow complaints are up everywhere across the Bay Area, and it’s not just people’s imaginations. The crow population also happens to be on the rise, according to Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society Executive Director Matthew Dodder.

“Where there are people, there tend to be crows,” Dodder said. “The population has been growing as the human population has been growing.”

In Oakland, the Golden Gate Audubon Society counted 2,543 crows during the last annual Christmas Bird Count in 2019 — an all-time high for the species, topping the previous year’s record. Before 2001, only once were more than 150 crows counted.

Dodder said audubon societies tend to get more calls about crows in the winter because that’s when their flocks are the largest.

“In the winter and in the fall when their nesting duties are done, they really rely on the safety of the group,” he said. “They’re watching for danger, they’re watching for intruders, they’re watching for hawks, so they benefit from that group dynamic.”

The crows have caused enough grief that some Bay Area residents have resorted to taking measures into their own hands. San Jose resident Alex Sorci said his condominium complex in the Willow Glen neighborhood saw so many crows and pigeons the past year that the homeowners association formed a “bird remediation committee.”

The association hired a falconer to lay out bird traps and install spikes and netting on 12-15 condos, a remediation effort that came with a $50,000-plus price tag.

Sorci said his biggest complaint with the crows is the noise they make, more so than their scavenging ways.

“Luckily our trash is pretty secure so we don’t have that problem, but they may get into the trash of the Grocery Outlet and the shopping center next to us,” he said.

In Sunnyvale, Mayor Larry Klein said he also has seen the problem get progressively worse in recent years.

“I think the biggest thing is if you can disperse them it’s not as bad, but we’ve had to do spray washing of our Plaza del Sol park mainly because of the odor,” he said. “The remains from them roosting has just been pretty unmanageable and a health risk at a certain point.”

The city has already tried to scatter the crows by using reflectors, but that only worked during the day with the sun up. City spokesperson Jennifer Garnett said RiverRock, the company that manages the buildings next to Plaza del Sol, tried to use a falcon to frighten off the crows.

“The crows are very smart, though, and come back once the deterrent goes away,” she said.

But lasers have been successful in crow abatement, according to the Humane Society, and Klein said some residents are already using them to keep crows off their lawns.

It’s a tactic the animal rights nonprofit describes as “humane harassment,” and cities like Rochester and Trenton in New York have used them. Other possible solutions the group suggests using are crow distress calls, pyrotechnics and hanging effigies of dead crows.

If the laser approach doesn’t work, the city may explore other options. But Cisneros is dubious of the Humane Society’s alternative suggestions.

“I can’t imagine that our staff in Sunnyvale is going to come back with a pyrotechnics proposal,” she said. “It’s a surprisingly complicated problem and something that there’s a lot of requests for us to solve.”