Subject: Tokyo's Feathered Terrorists! (long)
Date: Aug 11 10:29:36 2000
From: Jim McCoy - jfmccoy at earthlink.net


They forgot to blame them for the drug trade and for flawed
governmental policies. The next time I screw up and am
confronted with my mistake, I'm going to blame it on the
crows...

Jim McCoy
jfmccoy at earthlink.net
Redmond, WA



-----Original Message-----
From: Lydia Gaebe [mailto:lgaebe at email.msn.com]
Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2000 11:41 AM
To: Tweeters
Subject: Tokyo's Feathered Terrorists! (long)


Here is the text to the LA Times Crow story:


By VALERIE REITMAN, Times Staff Writer


TOKYO--They are on Tokyo's most-wanted list these days, vilified as child
abusers, arsonists, grave robbers and cannibals. They eat
everything--including the rotten and still-living.
Don't make eye contact, even from the seeming safety of a window. They
remember faces and may stalk you when you eventually emerge.
The villains are jungle crows--huge, jet-black creatures with
intimidating beaks, killer claws and a caw that sounds like a sea gull on
steroids.
About 21,000 of the birds, which are indigenous to parts of Asia, have
taken up residence in Tokyo, triple the number of 15 years ago. Until
recently, the crows were mostly just an annoyance, cackling like drunken
"salarymen" at predawn parties in Tokyo's few trees and having orgies amid
the tantalizing, thinly wrapped bags of garbage piled high on city streets.
But the brazen birds, which measure about 2 feet from beak to tail and
sport a wingspan of more than a yard, are now on the attack. The Japan Wild
Birds Assn. warns not to leave children unattended on terraces or in tiny
backyards--and with good reason.
Three-year-old Kimiko Enamoto was with her mother, Yuko, in a city park
when five crows suddenly swooped down. When the girl ran, they attacked her
from behind, pecking her on the head.
Yuko Enamoto threw one of her sandals at the birds, then rushed her
bleeding daughter to the doctor. Kimiko, who escaped with only a tetanus
shot, is getting over her terror of birds a lot more slowly than she is her
superficial wounds. "I think she can deal with sparrows now," her mother
says.
Enamoto theorizes that the birds sense fear--which is why they attacked
her daughter and not her friend's little boy, who stood still when the crows
rushed them.
"I usually still swing my handbag at them," she says. "I feel like if I
see a big bird, I'll show him who's boss."
But the birds showed Hiroshi Takaku, a political analyst, who's really
in charge.
When one of his colleagues was being attacked by two crows on the roof
of his Tokyo office building, Takaku took off his belt and started swinging
it. The birds kept their distance.
But a few days later, Takaku and his colleagues arrived at work to find
a crow cavalry awaiting them: Hundreds of crows flew over the downtown
office building in a scene out of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds."
"They threatened us by yelling or crying," Takaku says. "We think one
crow sent a signal to his colleagues to come back as a group. . . . My
colleagues knew they came for revenge."
Hiroshi Kawachi, deputy director of the Tokyo branch of the Japan Wild
Birds Assn., blames the mounting problem on the capital's failure to
adequately dispose of trash. Some businesses have banded together and hired
private trash services to pick up rubbish in their districts at night,
because the crows have poor night vision. Some districts encourage residents
to use trash cans that close completely.
But in many parts of Tokyo, which requires residents to put their trash
in semi-see-through plastic bags, most people just throw nets over the
garbage, which doesn't seem to deter the birds much. And Tokyo's move to
begin collecting the rubbish at 8 a.m. instead of an hour later is
worthless, Kawachi says. "The crows have already finished their breakfast
when men come to collect garbage at 8 a.m.--they usually eat at 5 to 6
a.m.," leaving rubbish strewn in their wake, he says.
Fortified by the urban smorgasbord, the emboldened crows then cruise
the city. Adults, children and even an occasional bicyclist are all high on
their pecking order, particularly in May and June, when the unwary targets
venture near protective crow parents hovering over their chicks. Although
statistics aren't available, city officials say several injuries have
required stitches, and one cyclist who was stalked by crows suffered broken
bones in falling.
More serious injuries are possible if the current pattern isn't broken,
Kawachi warns. "Crows do not have any morals to distinguish humans from
animals," he says of the birds, which are so tough that they sleep in
jerry-built beds made of metal clothes hangers.
Somewhat like the Japanese society in which they live, the birds feel
most comfortable in a group. They stalk their prey en masse and have even
been known to attack lambs and calves in the countryside. A favorite food is
road-kill cat, although the crows find the meal even tastier if the
unfortunate pet is still breathing.
Sometimes the crows even dine on each other. And although they stop
short of killing their young, that doesn't mean they won't eat the babies of
other bird species.
Tokyo is striking back with a controversial campaign, led by hawkish
Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara. His crow antipathy has its origins in a golf
course incident: He was attacked by vengeful crows after he hurled his club
at them, he told Japanese reporters.
Poisoning birds is prohibited in Tokyo, so this spring the city hired
five extermination companies to take down nests and kill chicks, although
the firms could crow only about their experience with pigeons, rats and
cockroaches. One company, Kokusai Eisei, feels so bad about killing the
babies (it dispatches them with chloroform) that it sends the ashes to
private pet tombs, paying $18 per pound for the repose of the bones.
The bird-busters come armed with helmets, acrylic masks and plastic,
elbow-length gloves. Guns are prohibited in Japan, so the defensive weapon
of choice is an open umbrella.
Hiroshi Tsurumaki, deputy manager of Kokusai Eisei, says the crows
never attacked while the exterminators did their dirty work but that five or
six parents usually glared nearby.
Certainly, when measured against Tokyo's crow crowds, the campaign
hasn't been overly successful: The exterminators have snatched just 60 nests
this summer, each of which contained two or three chicks. City officials
estimated that they've spent as much as $35,000 on the effort.
The crows have always been pests to farmers in the countryside. And two
years ago they were blamed for a forest fire in Iwate prefecture in northern
Japan. A witness reported seeing a crow drop a flaming potato chip
bag--picked up from a dump where outdated chips were being burned--over dry
weeds.
A year earlier, there had been another case of suspected crow arson: a
blaze sparked when the birds picked up incense from a graveyard and dropped
it on a nearby forest. Crows flock around cemeteries, where food, including
vegetables and fruit, is often brought as a gift for ancestors and where
those paying respects often light incense sticks.
"You cannot blame anybody for a crow-caused hazard," says Muneo
Hishinuma, the fire chief in the city of Kamaishi.
Perhaps the fires were accidental. Perhaps they weren't--everyone knows
the birds are smart. Enamoto, whose daughter was attacked, says that one day
in the park, she briefly left some leftovers unattended. The food was in a
plastic bag, inside a lunch box, inside another bag tied with a string. When
she returned a few minutes later, a crow had pulled everything out and was
munching on the fried chicken.
A sister species, the carrion crow, has been known to put walnuts,
which it can't open with its claws, in the path of oncoming cars and wait
for the four-wheeled nutcrackers to drive by before retrieving the delicacy.
The jungle crows, however, simply watch the carrion crows do the work and
then confiscate the reward.
They're not always so smart when it comes to their own reflection,
though: When they see themselves in building glass, they tend to mercilessly
peck at the image, sometimes killing themselves in the process.
Such deaths are among the few ways adult crows can die a nonnatural
death these days. There is just one creature known to eat crow in Japan: the
hawk. And it must be a huge hawk, or else the crows go after it.

Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times










Lydia Gaebe In Kent, WA USA
lgaebe at msn.com
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