Every winter, downtown Galesburg becomes a prime roosting site for crows. And over the years, people have tried — without much success — to get rid of them.
This year, the city of Galesburg is trying something new.
The city signed a $54,000 contract with Aviaway Bird Control Services to fly seven falcons in the downtown area to try driving out the crows. The falcons and their handlers started working earlier this month and will continue until Jan. 6, with the falcons flying during daytime hours.
Falcons are natural predators of crows. Galesburg’s Director of Community Development Steve Gugliotta and Associate Planner Lucas Brooks said the goal of the falconry initiative is for the crows to see the falcons and be scared away from the area, without the need to use other methods.
“They’re fairly intelligent, so they're not going to want to come back to an area where there's falcons or they feel that there's falcons. So hopefully this method, if it's effective, will deter them from coming back to the area,” Gugliotta said.
Other methods local officials have used in the past to deter crows include playing loud noises and distress calls, shining bright lights, displaying fake owls and crow effigies in trees, and even using flash bangs.
But these methods can be distressing to people, and none have been very effective at deterring the crows.
Brooks said the fake threats used in the past haven’t worked because crows could tell the difference. They figured out that the plastic owls weren’t real, for example.
“Whereas with the falcon[s], we're trying to sort of hone in and determine like a, ‘there are now falcons here; this whole area is bad,’ sort of mentality in the flocks. And time will tell, of course, how successful it is, but I think it'll be more successful trying this sort of natural method than some of the more artificial stuff we've had in the past that wasn't as persistent,” Brooks said.
Why are the crows so prevalent in Galesburg?
Knox College ornithology professor Jim Mountjoy said the birds feed on waste corn in the surrounding fields during the day. At night, they roost downtown to avoid predators like the great horned owl, and because it’s slightly warmer in the city.
Mountjoy said they like to roost in groups, and they have traditional roosting patterns.
“We see in Galesburg that they do shift different sections of the broader downtown area in different winters, or even within the winter, they may shift where most of them are settling. But it is strongly traditional, in general, that crows tend to occupy the same general areas year after year,” Mountjoy said.
So getting the crows to stay out of the area long-term poses a challenge, which is where the new falconry plan comes in.
Brooks said the contract is for a month because it will take time for the falcons to cover the whole downtown area.
The city will see how the falconry plan goes before deciding if they will continue bird control services into the future.
“Whether or not it's effective, I think, will be fairly evident. If the crows go away for a while, then it would be effective,” Gugliotta said.
The city is not sure where the crows will go if they do leave downtown. But Mountjoy doubts the crows will move far at all.
One reason is that the habitats and hunting timings between crows and falcons don’t quite line up.
“Certainly forests are not the natural habitat for falcons. And the crows coming into Galesburg are selecting areas with a number of trees. It's not exactly forest, but it's relatively dense. Not a good area for falcon hunting,” Mountjoy said. “The other thing is that the crows come to roost right around sunset and may at times often be coming in well after sunset. And falcons are generally diurnal hunters.”
Mountjoy said he expects the crows to find other areas within Galesburg to roost if the falcons scare them out of the downtown area.
“The falcons may pose something of a threat, but they're also balancing that threat against that of the great horned owls that are more numerous out in the countryside and that they can avoid, especially overnight hours, here in the city. So it's a pretty strong incentive for them to stay within the city limits,” Mountjoy said.
He also predicted that the falcons might not keep the crows away for long.
“It may disperse them from the local downtown area, at least temporarily, but as a solution for the whole of Galesburg, or for the longer term, I'm skeptical. We'll see what happens,” Mountjoy said.
Brooks said that the city reached out to several companies, and Aviaway was the most responsive. Before deciding to hire Aviaway, another option the city considered was to try attracting a wild peregrine falcon to live in Galesburg by setting up a nest box. But Brooks said Galesburg does not have the fast flowing water that these birds need.
“But it is something we looked into,” Brooks said. “I contacted a couple different non-profits just to see if we can make it work, but unfortunately we're not set up for it. But we did really look at all sorts of different avenues to try and solve this thing.”
The main issue they are trying to solve, Gugliotta said, is health concerns from droppings the crows leave behind.
“We hear from property owners and people trying to enjoy downtown that they just don't want to walk through it, they don't want to get hit by it, they don't want to touch it or be near it,” Gugliotta said. “And obviously there's an expense to trying to clean up that, as well.”
Gugliotta said cleaning up the droppings becomes a shared maintenance issue. A downtown council deals with most of the cleanup, but others have some costs as well.
For example, Knox College has cleanup costs. According to Director of Grounds Brad Bergren, the college’s grounds workers typically spend a total of anywhere from four to 16 hours a week in winters cleaning crow droppings on campus, but this amount varies considerably, and last year was an exception where they did not need to clean crow droppings at all.
Bergren expressed interest in the city’s falconry plan.
“It sounds like it's definitely worth a shot. I don't think we have anything to lose, the city has anything to lose by trying it. If they have some funding for it and they want to try it,” Bergren said.
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