Hours after the shooting stopped, crows were abundant in the trees along the Owasco Outlet. So many perched on branches they looked like fat leaves. The crow shoot Saturday and Sunday made barely a dent in the population, estimated at 50,000 crows. Did anyone think it would?

The shoot did succeed in uniting animal-rights advocates, dividing Auburn and giving the city an unwelcome stigma -- a bunch of "Gomers" was the insult repeated in The New York Times on Sunday.

So now that the crude event is over and most of the activists from groups such as PETA and The Fund For Animals have moved on to their next protest, Auburn is still left with the problem that caused so much ruckus in the first place: too many birds and no realistic plan to deal with them.

Crows dominate the city at dawn and dusk, and city officials have never offered an aggressive way to make the crows seek new roosts. On a small scale, city officials have tried balloons and recordings of bird calls, but clearly those haven't worked.

This weekend's crow event shows the seriousness of the problem. If anything good comes of the spectacle, maybe it will be a determined effort to find a solution. Other upstate cities, with smaller crow flocks, have called in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Fish and Wildlife Service, which offer advice about humane ways to shoo birds away. Auburn has simply remarked about its problem and talked about doing something about it, someday.

The animal-rights groups hadn't been offering any remedies before this weekend. PETA, so quick to denounce the crow shoot as barbaric, had never paid attention to the crow issue here or offered humane alternatives that would move the majority of the crows out of the center of the city.

Where was PETA months or years ago, when crows began to create a problem in Auburn? Instead, the members showed up Saturday and Sunday, staged a protest and created a stage for the self-important activist Brian Pease of Liverpool to get arrested not once, but twice, cited with trespassing on private property to frustrate hunters.

Pease, a member of the radical Animal Liberation Front, wasn't in Auburn to offer the community ideas about how to disentangle itself from the crows that leave droppings everywhere, get into trash and cause a health hazard.

No, it's time for City Hall, and this is primarily a city government problem, to make a concerted effort toward controlling the flock that roosts in Auburn. Auburn doesn't need the same ugly confrontation again next year.