A few months ago I posted a story about how crows were plaguing certain areas of Beijing. Apparently Tokyo and other areas of Japan are also being terrorized by the flying rats.
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.
Attacks, though rare, do happen. Hungry crows have bloodied the faces of children while trying to steal candy from their hands. Crows have even carried away baby prairie dogs and ducklings from Tokyo zoos, city officials said.
I have to admit here, when I was a child a crow snatched a kitten I’d recently gotten. I didn’t see it happen, but I found the fur, and crows were plentiful where my family lived at the time. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m scared of crows — I am, incidentally, fearful of rats – but I don’t like them.
The birds seem to be winning. Mr. Kyutoku said despite the twice-weekly patrols, which have removed 600 nests since they began three years ago, the number of nests keeps increasing, as have blackouts. The utility says there were three major cutoffs last year. The biggest was in March, when a strand of wire in a nest short-circuited power lines, briefly blacking out Kagoshima’s central port district. In another cutoff, some 610 homes and businesses lost power for 48 minutes when a crow stuck its beak into a high-voltage power line.
Crows have also shown a surprising ability to disrupt Japan’s super-modern technological infrastructure. In the last two years, utility companies in Tokyo reported almost 1,400 cases of crows cutting fiber optic cables, apparently to use as materials for nests. Blackouts have become common nationwide, including one last year in the northern prefecture of Akita that briefly shut down high-speed bullet train service.
6 responses so far ↓
1 Christopher Amano-Langtree // May 13, 2008 at 7:57 pm
The crows in Tokyo are quite fun. Intelligent and lively - they show that you cannot eliminate nature from the urban environment no matter how hard you try. As for the electricity blackouts if you are stupid enough to put your electricityl cables above ground on poles rather than burying them you must expect this sort of thing to happen.
2 simon // May 13, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Yeah, Tokyo crows are really big and intelligent, they know the garbage days of each district. I’d say they’re the third smartest animals on earth after dolphins and lab mice.
3 Westbaystars // May 13, 2008 at 11:27 pm
The crows and cats work together in my neighborhood to get under the nets at the trash. The cats are good at getting under the nets from where they can push bags out, then the crows rip the bags to shreds, exposing their tasty inners.
There was a show on TV a couple of years ago comparing city and country crows. The city crow could quickly figure out an obstacle course to get the food inside. The country crow didn’t care (as presumably it could get food in nature without so much effort).
I suspected the crows as being the cause of the missing litter of kittens in a previous area I lived in. There was a litter of kittens under a truck container for a couple of weeks, then suddenly they were gone. Someone may have taken them away, but those crows that were hanging around looked a bit bigger than usual the day I noticed.
4 jackson // May 14, 2008 at 12:08 am
One of my finest moments when living in Japan was finishing a DJ show at about 5 30 AM crack of dawn, walking to the subway with my records, and a crow let one fly right on my head and face. I needed weeks of therapy after that.
5 EW // May 14, 2008 at 6:41 am
Better crows than pigeons, aka the real flying rats. Also, better crows than actual rats, which I believe spread far more diseases.
6 Shinsano // May 14, 2008 at 11:04 am
Jackson: are you sure that wasn’t one of your female fans?
The crows at my parents also drop nuts onto the street so that oncoming cars will run over them and break them open.
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