Cape Cod NS plans to poison predatory crows
n the world of bird hierarchy, crows are considered one of the most intelligent birds out there. And it's this intelligence that has Cape Cod National Seashore officials considering a plan to kill some of the smartest crows on the cape with hopes of bolstering populations of piping plovers, a diminutive bird that, while perhaps not as brainy as crows, could face extinction if its numbers don't increase.
The problem, you see, is that some crows on the cape have developed a taste for plover, and they exploit this taste during the nesting season. While seashore biologists try to protect nesting plovers by placing exclosures -- a wire cage that has squares large enough for plovers to pass through but not crows -- around nests, some crows have figured out that they can get around this by landing with force atop the exclosure.
"Crows and other predators learn that ... a hard landing on top of the wire box might be enough to cause the parent plovers to get excited and move out of the cage, and then once they do that they’re fair game," says seashore Superintendent George Price. “Once you get the adult, who can no longer take care of the egg, on a hot summer day the egg gets cooked very quickly.”
With hopes of ending this behavior, at least in the short term, seashore biologists and U.S. Department of Agriculture specialists are proposing to poison crows that exhibit this particular hunting knowledge during the March-May nesting season. To do that, they would set up topless exclosures, which some crows have come to associate with nesting plovers, and plant eggs laced with DRC-1339, a "slow-acting avicide registered for controlling blackbirds, starlings, pigeons, gulls, magpies and ravens that damage agricultural crops, personal property or prey upon federally-designated threatened or endangered species." The poison is expected to kill crows that ingest it within 12-72 hours.