Charlottetown launches crow-chasing tactic

The City of Charlottetown demonstrated its latest weapon Thursday for keeping crows out of the Brighton neighbourhood.

The Phoenix Wailer is a $4,000 machine that plays sounds of predators and gunshots to disperse crows to another location. The city bought two of the machines.

The crows gather by the thousands in the neighbourhood and are both loud and messy.

"I've had people approach me continually since I've been elected to council about this whole issue of the crows," Coun. Rob Lantz said. "It was an issue before I was elected as well.

"This is just a pilot project to see if there's anything that can be done."

Lantz said people have been using a variety of their own methods to scare the crows away. These include air horns, popper guns, the banging of pots and pans and clapping boards together.

"Maybe there's a bit of a trade-off, but this is a machine designed for the job," he said.

Doug Hurry, who lives in the neighbourhood, said the noise of the crows isn't the only problem. It's what the birds leave behind.

"It's a health issue I think, more with the droppings," he said. "I've been hit a number of times, but you just don't look up when you walk underneath the trees."

The Wailers are just part of an arsenal of tools residents are able to borrow and take home for up to a month. Other crow-chasing devices include strobe lights and owl whistles.

Residents are being asked to record crow activity around their home for a week before they take a machine home, then report what effect the machine has.

But some residents, including Dwaine Oakley, are concerned the birds will simply move elsewhere.

"In using these different wailers or other techniques to go and move the birds around, they're just going to learn to adapt and move around to different areas and it's just going to become someone else's problem," Oakley said.

The city will evaluate the program in January.