AUBURN - With the day's waning hours still lit by the dusk sky, Jason Brown and Jim Buschman are on a crow hunt. But they don't have any bullets, and they aren't looking to kill.

Armed with what basically amounts to noise and light, the two Auburn Department of Public Works employees are driving throughout the city trying to find crows and chase them out of town.

They head toward the landfill on the city's northwest end, and the trees that were full of thousands of crows a week before are nearly bare.

“It's really a pretty gradual thing,” Brown says about how the crows' numbers have dwindled in a week. “But you begin to notice the first few days.”

Buschman points from the back of the city van to a cluster of black dots set against the fiery orange sky to the west. As the crows' silhouettes become more visible, Brown loads what looks like a flare gun and shoots a whistling firework toward the flock.

Sounds of a crow distress call are blasted from speakers, and the birds almost instantly swoop away from the landfill.

“It's like a little chess game for us,” said Buschman, who has taken on the job of living scarecrow more than a few times.

The men are one of a few city crews that carry out a crow-hazing program every fall. At dawn and dusk for 10 days, workers drive around town to crow hot spots in Auburn and aggravate the birds in an attempt to keep them from roosting.

They use high-powered lasers, cap guns and pyrotechnics for the job, as well as unsettling recorded sounds of crows in trouble.

At the beginning of the 10 days, tens of thousands of clamoring crows fill the trees while leaving behind a mess of feces. But they are tough to find after eight days of hazing, indicating the program continues to be effective after it was initiated with help from the federal government in 2005.

City officials have been pleasantly surprised with how well the hazing program is working. But neither they, nor experts in crow behavior, know how long that will last.

“Every year, I keep saying I hope we can get another year out of it,” Jerry DelFavero, the city's public works chief, said last week. “But it works well every year.”

It started when the U.S. Department of Agriculture sent a group to Auburn to see if the program could succeed. The department had initiated similar efforts in cities like Utica and Troy, where thousands of crows would descend every winter and create a nuisance.

But Auburn's 80,000-plus crow population was the largest the USDA had faced at the time.

DelFavero said the USDA officials carried out the hazing the first couple years while training the city workers. Eventually, the city purchased the equipment and took over.

During the hazing, three or four crews communicate over phone and radio. Each group has a designated portion of the city to cover, though they can overlap as they chase flocks.

“There's a system our guys have,” DelFavero said. “They work well together, and they communicate.”

The city looked at a number of ways to deal with crows before implementing the non-lethal hazing. One proposal was to hire falconers to scare the animals off with birds of prey.

Kevin McGowan, an ornithologist with Cornell, is familiar with Auburn's crows. An expert on the animal, he has studied the regional populations and followed the way communities deal with them.

Crows gather in large groups every winter to feed and forage, and they congregate at night to roost. Some of the birds in Auburn, McGowan said, are local crows that breed right here. Many of them, though, are from as far away as Montreal, West Virginia and Maryland.

The birds have been coming to the area since the first half of the 20th century, he continued. But tens of thousands of them started moving into the city, especially the downtown area, in the late 1990s for an unknown reason.

McGowan said communities like Auburn will not be able to simply stop this from happening. It's in the bird's nature.

“Crows have been getting together in groups for as long as there have been crows,” he said. “They're like teenagers. You can scare them away from in front of the drug store, but you can't stop them from getting together. You can just control, to a certain extent, where they go.”

For the local program, it's anywhere but here. Crow populations in Syracuse and Geneva have noticeably grown since Auburn started hazing, according to various reports.

McGowan said earlier this week that he thinks the current program is good in that it doesn't cause permanent harm to the animals. But he said he didn't know whether it will continue to be effective year in and year out.

“Based on people's experiences, there seems to be a lifetime to this stuff, that eventually (the crows) don't bother. They just ignore it,” McGowan said.

And while he has generally positive things to say about the crow hazing, even calling it “almost respectful” to the birds, he also said there is something awe-inspiring about being around wildlife when they gather in large numbers.

“Seeing 70,000 of any animal coming together at once is pretty impressive,” McGowan said. “But I don't want them sitting over my car, either.”

When all the light is gone from the sky at 6 p.m., Brown and Buschman are still on the lookout. It's dark outside and they can't see the crows anymore, so the best technique is to flash the high-powered laser into groves of trees they frequent.

The trees above the Seward House are favorites for the crows. Brown points the red beam at the branches, Buschman lets the crow calls loose, and dozens of crows fly out of the trees and head north.

“Where they go from here, we don't really care,” Buschman says.

Staff writer Christopher Caskey can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 282 or christopher.caskey@lee.net.

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