Crows Crap All Over Trenton

The city plans to try to scare away the roosting crows with pyrotechnics. Evidence shows a weeklong all-night rave might also work.

Trenton makes the world takes - crows

Photo illustration, obviously | Crow photo by mdf (license)

Trenton makes, the world takes a crap.

A harrowing report from NBC10 over the weekend detailed a problem in New Jersey’s capital city: a murder of crows that won’t stop shitting all over.

NBC10 says the mess outside state government offices is growing, and quotes one man who says people were pooped on while walking to a bar. The Trentonian quotes an email from a reader:

“The whole area actually is covered,” one woman said in an email to The Trentonian. “And I mean covered in bird shit. The smell is toxic. It’s everywhere. Like a blanket. And all these people are walking through it and bringing it into the buildings around it. It’s going to be causing a lot of illnesses.”

Some of the photos of the crow crap-covered city are truly terrifying.

The city tells both outlets they’re going to attempt to drive the crows away humanely with pyrotechnics, loud booms similar to fireworks. The Humane Society of the United States explains that crows began roosting in urban areas in large numbers in the 1960s.

Indeed, Trenton was one of many cities with had an infestation of crows back in March 2001. Per the Humane Society, other ways urban areas get rid of crows is with recorded crow distress calls, lasers that distract the birds or by “hanging effigies (fake models) of dead crows (never the real thing) — a few fake Halloween décor crows prove surprisingly effective.”

There may be a way to turn this into a tourism opportunity. The Humane Society also notes that “one community moved a neighborhood roost by just having people out on the sidewalks with noisemakers at dusk for the better part of a week. Apparently the crows did not like the party-going human neighbors every night.”

All the city needs to do to get rid of its bird shit problem is hold a weeklong, all-night rave. That’d be the kind of ingenuity that made Trenton famous.