Attack of the Crows — Attack of the Humans

Ah, Japan…land of the samurai, the graceful movements of the tea ceremony, and really weird cartoons. Is it any wonder that a perfect parable of the ruined relationships caused by wasteful living would come from that fine land?

Crows are on the attack in Japan, and apparently, they’re quite the formidable opponent.

Blackouts are just one of the problems caused by an explosion in Japan’s population of crows, which have grown so numerous that they seem to compete with humans for space in this 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 residents.

It is a scourge straight out of Hitchcock, and the crows here look and act the part. With wing spans up to a yard and intimidating black beaks and sharp claws, Japan’s crows are bigger, more aggressive and downright scarier than those usually seen in North America.

This was published in an article in the New York Times, and I have to say, I was fascinated by it.

It seems that the crows are building nests in power lines, damaging the electric infrastructure of the country. The problem has become especially prominent in recent years because of the expansion of the crow population — and guess what caused the population boom. Yup, humans.

How? Waste. Because crows are scavengers, they often feed off the trash left out by humans. And according the New York Times, Japan’s been generating more and more waste as it embraces a more Western approach to waste management. Thus, more waste, more crows, more problems.

But the fight of humans and crows is complicated; the crows are very foxy (no pun intended…okay, a little bit of a pun intended). They build fake nests in order to distract the workers ordered to remove the nests; they have found ways around nets that are meant to keep the crows from tearing into the garbage. Aside from hunting down the crows one by one and killing them, not many solutions seem to have worked. Probably one of the neatest, and most eerie, quotes I’ve ever come across in a news article was in the piece.

“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.”

Spooky.

But I think the question is interesting, because it sort of calls into question this whole idea of human domination. If anything, we’re constantly being bombarded with information about the way nature dominates humans, even if it seems to work the other way around (wishful thinking at its best). But for the most part, even if modern humans are somewhat enlightened enough to realize that they’re not in control of the wild, most people still believe that our cities are within our grasp.

After all, we build them the way we want them to be. The buildings are ours; the land is ours. We live there, our businesses are headquartered there, we drive our cars on the city streets. If threre’s something that we want in a city, the only things to stop us from getting it are money and time. Need a mall? Whoosh! There’s a mall. Need a skyscraper? Whoosh! There’s a skyscraper.

And through that whole process, because we build over forests and marshes and even the sea, we think that it somehow becomes ours. Hell, even I sort of believe hesitatingly in the polarity of society and wilderness.

But in Japan, we see that it is not so. In some ways, the city is the dwelling of the crows; it is their paradise, not ours. And when you start to look around your own city (if you have the misfortune to live in one), you might see that the place you think is yours might not be yours after all. Pigeons, crows, squirrels, rats…all of these creatures make their way in the city.

So. Who’s city is it? Good question. In the battle between crows and humans, it might turn out that we’ll just have to eventually give up, exasperated, and start to realize that even the cities aren’t ours.