Eat crow!

[cstaylor]

Well the Tokyo Crows sure have outwitted our fave politician Ishihara-san.

I can't imagine that being too hard, especially since he's busy planning a new power station in the middle of nowhere 1,000km or so from Tokyo.

[kurohinge1]

...
ABC: Among Bird Brains, Crows Are Most Clever, Survey Finds
... the smartest bird in the world ... the common crow...

Rock on train tracks causes scare in Hokkaido

DATE, Hokkaido -- A stone that a appeared on a JR railway track here, forcing the driver of a train to suddenly hit the brakes, was probably placed there by a crow, police have concluded.

... When Date police examined the scene, they found fragments of scallop and other shellfish scattered at the scene. A scallop farm is located nearby, and local residents said they had seen crows dropping stones and shells on the train tracks numerous times, leading police to suspect that a crow was responsible for the incident.

Another train was forced to apply its emergency brakes on the same section of the track last Wednesday because of a stone that had apparently been dropped by a crow... more

A related story I saw concluded that crows can stash food under or near a rail and then place a stone on top so they can find it again easily.

Stone, the Crow's.

[Captain Japan]

Scavenging crows blinded by science
Gomiuri

The battles of wits between people and scavenging crows may end in favor of humans, at least temporarily, thanks to special translucent plastic garbage bags.

The task of keeping crows away from garbage pickup sites, especially in urban areas, is a high priority for many local governments.

The Tokyo metropolitan government, for instance, spent 500 million yen on programs to eradicate crows for five years up to the end of fiscal 2005.

While newly developed yellow translucent garbage bags are attracting attention from many local governments as a promising solution to the crow nuisance, many local entities are embarking on large-scale culling operations of the birds as a last resort.

"We're determined to implement a total crow-eradicating campaign," declared Gov. Shintaro Ishihara in September 2001....more...

[Taro Toporific]

[INDENT][floatl][/floatl]TED 2008: Crow vending machine maker Joshua Klein
Feb. 29, 2008 / BoingBoing
Technology hacker Joshua Klein built a vending machine that teaches crows to deposit coins they find into a special vending machine that dispenses peanuts...
...His machine uses Skinnerian training. He put coins and peanuts around the machine. The crows eat the peanut on the feeder tray. Then Joshua took away the nuts and left coins in the feeder tray. It pisses off the crows. They sweep the coins around with their beaks, looking for food. When a coin accidentally drops into the slot, it dispenses a peanut. Next, Joshua took away the coins. The crows learned to find coins elsewhere and deposit them....[/INDENT]

[Greji]

[INDENT][floatl][/floatl]TED 2008: Crow vending machine maker Joshua Klein
Feb. 29, 2008 / BoingBoing

Isn't that how you learned to use a beer machine Taro?

[Taro Toporific]

...took away the nuts and left coins in the feeder tray. It pisses off the crows. They sweep the coins around with their beaks, looking for food. When a coin accidentally drops into the slot, it dispenses a peanut. Next, Joshua took away the coins. The crows learned to find coins elsewhere and deposit them..

.

Isn't that how you learned to use a beer machine Taro?

Hey, I will be the first to admit that that's how I always figure out to use an unfamiliar multi-function copy machine at a Japanese convenience store.

[Mulboyne]

IHT: As the crows fly, Japanese get fed up

Fanning out in small teams, the men in grey jumpsuits scour the streets and rooftops with binoculars, seeking to guard this city from a growing menace. They look for tell-tale signs: a torn garbage bag, a pile of twigs atop an electric pole or one of the black, winged culprits themselves. "There's one!" goes up a shout. Sure enough, one of their quarry flies brazenly overhead: a crow, giving a loud, taunting caw as it passed. This is the Crow Patrol of Kyushu Electric Power, a utility company, on the hunt for crows whose nests on electric poles have caused a string of power blackouts in this city of a half-million on Japan's southern island of Kyushu. Blackouts are just one of the problems caused by an explosion in Japan's population of crows, which have so grown numerous they seem to compete with humans for space in this densely crowded nation. Communities are scrambling to find ways to relocate or reduce their crow populations, as ever larger flocks of loud, ominous birds have taken over parks and nature reserves, frightening away human residents. It is a scourge straight out of Hitchcock, and the crows here look and act the part. With wing spans up to a meter and intimidating black beaks and sharp claws, Japan's crows are big, aggressive and downright scary..."Japanese react to crows because we fear them," said Michio Matsuda, a board member of the Wild Bird Society of Japan and author of books on crows. "We are not sure sometimes who is smarter, us or the crows"...more...

[james]

metal fucking garbage bins and don't leave trash strewn all about. no food -> no crows.

[ramchop]

no food, then they'll go after your babies

[james]

no food, then they'll go after your babies

could be darwinism in action. the moron parents who leave their kids unattended or otherwise ignore them will have their offspring swept up to be pecked to death.

[Taro Toporific]

[floatl][/floatl]

In Tokyo, Hitchcock Isn't Around, but He Seems to Have Sent the Birds
Washington Post - Sunday, July 26, 2009
...."Yes, they have returned," admitted Naoki Satou, the chagrined point man for the city's eight-year-old war on crows.
The conflict had gone Tokyo's way until 2006, when the formidably beaked carrion-eaters launched a counterattack. The crow count has since risen about 30 percent...more...

[IkemenTommy]

metal fucking garbage bins and don't leave trash strewn all about. no food -> no crows.

Legalize guns.

[james]

it boggles my mind that these people can't solve the problem from the source - garbage management. honestly, to expect otherwise with garbage strewn all over the place and lame half-arsed measures such as "blue blankets" or nets to cover it etc is ridiculous.

a cull, traps and the like are little more than stop-gap measures which continue to cost and have no long-term impact.

for the hundreds of millions of yen that have been spent, they could educate residents to use / provide latchable aluminium or hard plastic garbage cans in which the garbage bags are placed or provide such bins for neighbourhood collections.

am i missing something? i just don't see how this is such a difficult thing to fix.

[Taro Toporific]

i... provide latchable aluminum or hard plastic garbage cans in which the garbage bags are placed or provide such bins for neighbourhood collections..

When first came to Tokyo in 1984, the old neighborhood had the blue plastic garbage cans and you can see in the Kodachrome below.
I assume, Tokyo government banned them in 1985(?) in order to speed up garbage collection (save time/labor/money). The whole problem started when Tokyo government mandated using only plastic garbage bags that crows could tear open and have a party.

[color="Gray"]Via Gullevek's flickr photostream[/color]

[james]

The whole problem started when Tokyo government mandated using only plastic garbage bags that crows could tear open and have a party.

guess that came around to bite them in the ass. not sure why that pic you posted made me think of 'sesame street'.

[Greji]

[color="Gray"]Via Gullevek's flickr photostream[/color][/URL]

Where I live in the mountains, we still use these type of buckets and monooki type of places to protect from the monkeys, tanuki, crows, etc. Yet, we still have to bag the trash accordingly.

[james]

Where I live in the mountains, we still use these type of buckets and monooki type of places to protect from the monkeys, tanuki, crows, etc. Yet, we still have to bag the trash accordingly.

you live in the mountains too? you should come by here sometime then, you'd feel right at home.

around here we have the garbage "cages" to keep out the likes that you mentioned above.

as for mono-oki type places, i'm reasonably sure at the moment that my mother-in-law considers any unused space in the house (not that there is much of that left) for such.

[Greji]

you live in the mountains too?

Only on the weekends. I stay downtown during the week. I mean ain't nothing in the mountains, but the animals and my wife. So Roppongi is quieter.

around here we have the garbage "cages" to keep out the likes that you mentioned above.

Those are used because the monkeys can get into anything and although they are small, we get the occasional bear in the mountains in west Tokyo. As a matter of fact, most train lines going into the mountains(Ome line, past Ome, Itsukaiichi, in some places) have warnings about bears for those going into the mountains. There are some signs warning blondes about Take since this is out in his home area from Tachikawa on....

[Mike Oxlong]

From NPR--->

Here's a surprise: Wild crows can recognize individual people. They can pick a person out of a crowd, follow them, and remember them — apparently for years. But people — even people who love crows — usually can't tell them apart. So what we have for you are two experiments that tell this story...

Click for story and video.

[Behan]

Oh, no, it looks like us FGs aren't the only ones who like Greji's avatar. An infatuated crow must have flown off with it!

[osopolar]

around here we have the garbage "cages" to keep out the likes that you mentioned above.

We have cages around here as well, and I thought that was pretty much the standard all around until I saw a prog on trash/garbage problems + crows a few weeks back on some channel.. can't remember which. but lately when i pass through himeji i'm starting to see a lot of the big ass crows hovering and hopping around stalking places. seriously, if not cages, metal bins would take care of the problem, no?

[IkemenTommy]

We have cages around here as well, and I thought that was pretty much the standard all around until I saw a prog on trash/garbage problems + crows a few weeks back on some channel.. can't remember which. but lately when i pass through himeji i'm starting to see a lot of the big ass crows hovering and hopping around stalking places. seriously, if not cages, metal bins would take care of the problem, no?

Although that works great in theory, the problem is that the Japanese have the extreme fear for any kind of trash bin in public.. thanks to those dip shit Aum shinrikyo cock suckers that planted the sarin gas in Tokyo subway.

[Mike Oxlong]

Although that works great in theory, the problem is that the Japanese have the extreme fear for any kind of trash bin in public.. thanks to those dip shit Aum shinrikyo cock suckers that planted the sarin gas in Tokyo subway.

Wasn't it the government and media who reacted with such fear and alarmism that kinda ruined it for good?

[Doctor Stop]

Although that works great in theory, the problem is that the Japanese have the extreme fear for any kind of trash bin in public.. thanks to those dip shit Aum shinrikyo cock suckers that planted the sarin gas in Tokyo subway.

And Aum didn't even put sarin in station trash bins, they put plastic bags of the stuff in subway cars. When's the government going to outlaw plastic bags and subways?

Wait a sec, they put garbage in plastic bags now. Run for your lives.