Getting Away With a Murder
A case study on (nonviolently!) shooing the crows that are digging up your lawn.
When it comes to the education of a gardener, the questions never stop coming. For instance, many of you may be wondering why crows are relentlessly digging up your lawn. It’s a mystery to me, but I know where to go for answers. Perhaps this corvid case study can inspire ways to investigate your future garden queries.
My sleuthing began with a call to the Plant Answer Line, a free resource offered by the Elisabeth C. Miller Library. Librarian Jessica Moskowitz quickly responded by providing me with several links to ecological turf management and pest control. Brilliantly, she also connected me with John Marzluff, a professor of wildlife science at the UW and author of several books on bird behavior, including In the Company of Crows and Ravens.
Thinking about crow behavior prompted me to reach out to Lyanda Haupt, a Seattle-based naturalist and author of Crow Planet, Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness. Haupt, a fellow West Seattle resident, pointed me to a story on the West Seattle blog that linked to an article from UBC Botanical Garden entitled “Why are Crows ruining My Lawn! a.k.a. Living with European Chafer Beetle in Vancouver”
The technical resources and links provided information about the recent influx of the European chafer beetle, whose grubs feed on the roots of your lawn and how to manage the problem. While the wildlife writers helped me understand the nature of the phenomena, which is simply an animal doing what it’s good at and incidentally, helping to control an invasive species.
Read the entire story in the link below