Nordin Gallery Blog

Images are from Yoyogi park, Institute of Nature study and Toshimaoka Cemetery in Tokyo.These parks are roosting sites and host large populations of the Jungle crow in Tokyo. The jungle crow in Tokyo interest me specifically for their adaptation ability and their constant struggle with man.

Notes: Tokyo has experienced several drastic changes in environment since 1945: a rise from the ashes after large-scale air raids in 1945, rapid urbanization in the 1960s associated with the high growth rate of the Japanese economy, and severe pollution of the air and water due to industrial waste and household refuse in the 1970s. In the 1980s, however, as the environment was remediated and the trees on the streets grew, wildlife, especially birds and insects, started to return to central Tokyo (Tokyo Environmental Pollution Bureau, 1998).

Considering this major change in the environment, it is of great interest to see how the Jungle Crow population and habitat use have changed. A major change occurred in the garbage collection system in 1986. Garbage was put out in plastic bags, instead of conventional dustbins at garbage stations on the streets (Kurosawa et al., 2003). This coincided with the time that Japanese women started to join the labor force, resulting in fewer homemakers available to retrieve the dustbins from the garbage stations after the garbage was collected. As a result, most of the dustbins were left out on the streets throughout the day of garbage collection, obstructing traffic (Saitoh, 1999).

In the 1950s, household garbage was collected from wooden boxes with lids installed on the streets. In the 1960s when plastic came into wide use, the garbage boxes were replaced by plastic buckets with lids. Then in the 1980s, as plastic bags came into common use, garbage in plastic bags was put out at communal garbage collection stations on the streets. Since then crows moved to the city The city’s 8-year-old war on crows had gone Tokyo’s way until 2006. The crow count has since risen about 30 percent. Besides indulging in their usual high jinks – ripping open plastic garbage bags, scaring children in parks – crows have been accused of sabotaging the city’s high-speed Internet network.

Hundreds of fiber-optic cables claimed to have been slashed open by crows scrounging high-tech stuffing for their nests. The birds are also blamed for periodic blackouts. In 2001 one crow whooshed near Shintaro Ishihara, governor of Tokyo, while he was playing golf. “I intend to make crow-meat pies Tokyo’s special dish,” Ishihara announced. And the crow war commenced, with broad public support and not much carping from animal-rights groups. Everyone agreed that the in-town population of the mischievous creatures had gotten out of hand: Their numbers had more than quintupled between 1985 and 2001, increasing from 7,000 to 36,400. At last count, the city has exterminated 105,392 crows, with an estimated 21,200 still at large. Most were caught in traps baited with mayonnaise or lard. They were gassed with carbon monoxide and cremated in one of the city’s many high-efficiency garbage incinerators.

Tokyo’s metropolitan government has incurred $5.3 million in extermination costs – about $50 per dead crow. The effort appears to have mollified residents, as crow complaints have fallen by 80 percent in the past six years. Noise, assaults, scattering are the main themes of complaints towards crows in Tokyo. The responses to the questionnaires returned by ordinary citizens showed that the contents of the trouble had different ratings from those of the complaints. “Garbage scattering” was rated as the most serious problem in this case, followed by “noisy calls”. On the other hand, “assaults on humans” was considered less significant among the crow issues, suggesting that “assaults on humans” had been over-represented in the complaints against crows recorded in the city offices and in the media coverage. It is rather immature to consider that “crows are bad, and humans are their victims,” because crows are naturally attracted to food sources that come out of human society in many cases.

Therefore we should keep in mind that no such living things as “pest species” or “unnecessary species” exist, because all species of life are ecologically interrelated through the food web, constituting biodiversity on earth. Moreover, history has remonstrated us against simple-minded “pest controls,” which have very frequently induced other unexpected disasters, such as an explosive increase in prey species (insects) of a controlled species (crows) (Forbush, 1927; Inoue, 1950; Inugai & Haga, 1953).

Crows_Toshimagaoka