Crows back downtown; 'coffins' returning to help drive them away

It's a celestial event akin to a solar eclipse or a late-night meteor shower.

The crows, that is. They are back in force in the downtown's Greene Square Park, and at dusk, it's quite the sight to see the thousands of giant, black birds converge, circle and then descend on the block-size park's trees, where they hunker down to spend the night.

More fascinating still are the crow coffins - the invention of former Cedar Rapids city veterinarian Russell Anthony - which will be going up in short order in the park's trees to move the crows and, all importantly, the droppings they leave behind elsewhere.

The crow coffin, a primitive piece of crow-chasing wizardry, is a piece of board on which two dead crows are attached, one face up, one face down, to the side of the board visible from the sky. The boards will be placed in eight of the park's trees, about 10 to 15 feet below the treetops, Daniel Gibbins, the city's parks superintendent, said this week.

The crow coffins are new to Gibbins, who took over the city's parks superintendent post in November 2009, but the coffins have proved instantly effective in Greene Square Park for more than a decade.

“It's definitely a different kind of method, but it seems to work,” Gibbins said.

As puzzling, he added, is why the crows stayed away from Greene Square Park last winter without the crow coffins.

“My guess is that there was a different weather pattern last year, and they were roosting at another spot,” Gibbins said.

Callers, though, have notified the parks office in recent days to say the crows and their mess are back in the park, which prompted Gibbins to review what the city has done in the past. The methods have included banging tin garbage can lids and broadcasting the sound of gunshots through the night. But only the crow coffins have worked, Gibbins said.

Crow-coffin inventor Anthony said back in 2006 that a friend of his who hunted crows in northeast Iowa suggested the coffin idea after a crow he had shot remained high up in a tree. Other crows instantly stopped roosting in the tree, and so Anthony decided to try the crow coffins, with the dead crows visible to the birds but not to people on the ground. To his surprise, he was able to outsmart the big birds.

Anthony and others have said over the years that the downtown creates a microclimate of relative warmth in the winter that attracts the crows to the park at night. There is strength in numbers, too, to prevent predator owls from attacking, experts have said.

The importance of Greene Square Park to the downtown is slated to climb in the years ahead as the city's new library is built across Fourth Avenue SE from it to serve as one bookend for the park. The Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, across Third Avenue SE from the park, is the other.

Gibbins said it will be interesting to see if the new, two-story library will alter the winter allure of the park for the crows.

“A large structure like that could change things,” he said. “We can hope that.”

In the short term, Gibbins is making arrangements, likely with the Police Department, to shoot several crows so there are dead crows to place on boards to frighten the rest of the crows in Greene Square Park.