A murder of crows (top) perch in trees along the Wabash River on the outskirts of Terre Haute at dusk Wednesday, just before crossing into the downtown area for the night. A crow (insert) perches in a tree near Seventh and Cherry streets in downtown Terre Haute on Thursday morning.
A murder of crows (top) perch in trees along the Wabash River on the outskirts of Terre Haute at dusk Wednesday, just before crossing into the downtown area for the night. A crow (insert) perches in a tree near Seventh and Cherry streets in downtown Terre Haute on Thursday morning.
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Somewhere in Terre Haute, a crow will perch on the same building that bird’s father once sat upon. And his grandfather before that.

Wintering in this city is a family tradition for these crafty, cawing, 1-pound, black corvids — better known as the American crow.

Once here, they spend their days getting food and water in farm fields along the Wabash River, and then flock into the downtown at night, attracted by the urban warmth, the lighting that inhibits their predators (primarily Great Horned Owls), and tasty tidbits left in stray trash. And crows poop. A lot. Splotches cover sidewalks, shop awnings and cars.

Roosts of between 10,000 and 60,000 crows have been migrating into Terre Haute in October and sticking around until March every winter since the early 1990s. They don’t just stumble onto this town, either.

Many of the crows — which live an average of seven to eight years — have spent previous winters here.

“Their parent and their grandparents probably knew Terre Haute, too,” said Lee Humberg, Indiana state director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

So, they know their turf. And they know human Hauteans. In fact, a study in 2006 by University of Washington wildlife biologist John Marzluff and his students found that crows can recognize human faces.

“These are some of the smartest birds there are, extremely intelligent, and man, they test your will,” Humberg said in a phone interview Friday from Indianapolis. The USDA has assisted Indianapolis in coping with its crow population, which has dwindled from 20,000-plus annually to about 3,000 now.

That effort has been ongoing for 20 years.

Any community building a strategy to disperse a large winter crow roost from a downtown area needs to be in it for the long haul.

“A lot of it comes down to persistence. It’s key,” Humberg said. “It’s going to take years to address this problem.”

Now, Terre Haute will try again to control its wintertime crow influx.

Last month, the Terre Haute/Vigo County Capital Improvement Board approved the hiring of Another Wild Goose Chase — a Chicago firm specializing in problematic bird solutions — to assess the city’s crow problem.

The company’s biologists are scheduled to come to Terre Haute on Monday, according to the Terre Haute Chamber of Commerce, and are expected to visit tall buildings downtown this month.

Efforts to shoo crows from downtown Terre Haute and divert them into rural areas date back to the late 1990s and early 2000s. The late, great Joy Sacopulos led the volunteer Terre Haute Crow Patrol in those years, valiantly battling icy, sleety conditions.

The volunteer project included about $2,000 a year from the city, according to Tribune-Star archives, and later increased to between $3,000 and $5,000 when former Mayor Duke Bennett’s Code Enforcement staff took over the duties.

The city’s crow-control routine idled through COVID-19 pandemic with a shortage of part-time employees and volunteers.

Mayor Brandon Sakbun, now entering his second year in office and also a CIB member, understands the importance of handing the massive crow numbers.

“My main goal is to find a safe and reasonable way to divert these crows away from downtown and to more rural area,” Sakbun said via email Friday morning.

“There are public health concerns with the crows. From crow poop to dead crows in our alleys, this situation has been unaddressed for years. I acknowledge that it is difficult to find a humane solution to this challenge. But I look forward to working with our biologist team to find some opportunities.”

The biologists won’t have to look far to find the crows.

Last month, Wabash Valley Audubon Society teams counted 18,300 crows during the organization’s 2024 Christmas Bird Count, an annual tally of all bird species in Terre Haute.

But … That total is “likely an underestimate of the number roosting in town that night,” said Peter Scott, Audubon member and retired Indiana State University ecology professor.

Scott and his students conducted comprehensive crow counts each year, before his retirement. In peak years, Scott’s classes counted up to 60,000 crows.

During this year’s Christmas Bird Count, Scott and his Audubon teammates reached their 18,300 total by counting the crows crossing the Wabash near the RiverFront-Lofts Apartments on the east bank. The Christmas Count crow totals — some more concentrated than others — have topped 3,000 every year since 1995, Scott said last week.

Terre Haute ranked among the seven largest winter crow roosts in the U.S. in 2010, according to a University of Vermont researcher. But urban crows aren’t a rarity. South Bend and Bloomington, for example, began sharing in the crow experience a few years ago.

“Terre Haute is far from unique — every state from here to Massachusetts has at least a few cities with roosts of 10K or more,” Scott said. “Some cities are lucky in that the crows pick a spot where their impact is not serious for businesses or residences. Most are not lucky, and put up with the situation as we do.”

The tactics deployed in various cities vary, though most include a regimen of laser lights and pyrotechnic pops around dusk when the crows flow into downtowns. A few have tried to “murder” the murders of crows. (That’s the word for a crow assembly, like a “pack” of wolves.)

• Portland, Oregon relies on its “Poopmaster 6000” — sort of a street sweeper/crow-dropping Zamboni — to scrub away the goo and mess. Portland, which is committed to nonlethal methods of crow control, also uses hawks from the Bird Alliance of Oregon, with trained falconers, to “haze” the crows and scare them out of the downtown, according to a Smithsonian Magazine story.

• Tokyo, Japan has tightened its garbage disposal system, to keep crows from trash-picking. But Tokyo’s strategies also include deploying hefty 10-foot by 20-foot traps, using lard as bait, to catch and kill the crows, NPR reported.

• After more than a decade of nonlethal efforts to control crows, city parks crews in Rochester, Minnesota, will now use airsoft, plastic- pellet-shooting rifles to kill some crows and create a sense of danger to deter them from gathering downtown, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported in November.

• Illinois, which includes one of the world’s largest crow roosts in Danville, has seen its crow numbers decrease because of West Nile virus, according to a WBE Z Chicago report.

In Terre Haute, Scott is skeptical that lethal tactics would effectively curtail the crows downtown.

“I’m doubtful that there is a nonlethal method of keeping crows from roosting in a city in winter, once they have taken a liking to that city, the foraging possibilities in the surrounding area, and the availability of staging areas (temporary perching and socializing spots prior to roosting),” Scott said.

“You can move them around within a city — as ISU seems to do with nightly pyrotechnics, keeping them off certain areas of campus,” Scott added. “But [crows] put up with a lot of harassment, intentional and unintentional, and just fly to alternative roosting spots — returning to their favorite spots a few hours later.”

Instead, the USDA’s Lee Humberg said cities with some crow dispersal success stories use multiple tactics, day after day after day, and alter their routines so the wily birds can’t anticipate the humans’ schemes. USDA observers have seen crows change their entry routes into Indianapolis, and rotate their nightly hangouts, just to dodge lasers and booms.

“You have to have an integrated approach, have a lot in your toolchest and not rely on any one tool,” Humberg said, “because they get desensitized to it.”

Stay on schedule, diversify, start as soon as crows arrive for the season, and be unpredictable (to the birds, that is).

“Whoever’s doing the work, you’ve got to constantly mix it up,” Humberg said, “because they’re really, really smart.”
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