MANSFIELD — Mark Abrams peered into the crow-less Central Park trees on Wednesday evening and smiled.
“This is the quietest night in Central Park in a long time,” the city’s parks and recreation superintendent said. “I feel like this is some kind of a victory tonight.”
Call it green laser light 1, crows 0 — albeit however temporarily.
For the second consecutive evening, Abrams was waiting for the large murder of crows to arrive in their favorite Central Park roosting area.
On Tuesday, he used a Bluetooth speaker to play a YouTube recordings of a great horned owl, a natural enemy of the crows. The effort met with limited success as the crows which chose to relocate simply moved across Park Avenue to waiting trees on the other side.
The $20, hand-held green laser Abrams had delivered on Wednesday afternoon shined a far different story. The laser, which offered both a single-beam or a diffused screen of lights, was instantly effective.
Starting on the south side of the park on the square, as temperatures headed into single digits, Abrams hit the trees with the light show as soon as the first group of crows landed in the branches around 6:10 p.m.
Startled, the crows fled quickly.
Kevin McGowan, an ornithologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in New York, recently told the New York Times that crows will see the green light and may think animals are running over the branches.
Perhaps successfully bluffed, the hope is the crows will then fly somewhere else to sleep for the night. However, McGowan, who has studied crows for three decades, said dispersing the birds is a tricky game.
The fact is crows are intelligent birds and may not want to leave a place they have already settled, McGowan said.
McGowan was quoted in an article about the community of Sunnyvale, Calif., trying the same laser light effort, along with playing recorded sounds of crows in distress.
In Mansfield, no crows returned to the trees on the south side of Park Avenue for the next 40 minutes while Abrams was there.
He then worked trees on the north side of the square, using the single-beam that had the same effect. The crows fled quickly.
A group diminishing in size returned, trying to land in the best lit tree on the north side of the park, which is bathed in the light from the American flagpole. Abrams easily dispersed them with the laser.
He saw a large flock landing on the roof of the Park National Bank bank building on the west side of the square. Abrams shined the single beam along the roof top — and the crows fled quickly. The same thing happened on the roof of the former Reed’s building on the south side.
For 45 minutes, Central Park was quiet, save for the vehicles driving through. No noisy crow “caws” that have been a winter-time staple of the park for as long as anyone can remember.
More importantly, no crows roosting above and pooping down below on the sidewalks, monuments and benches.
Abrams admitted he had no idea how long the crows would be gone. They would likely return Wednesday evening after he left. He planned to return early Thursday morning and drive out the ones who do return overnight.
He said parks department employees would return Thursday and Friday at dusk and likely in the days ahead as winter continues.
“This is an ongoing experiment,” Abrams said. “The laser works a lot better than the owl sounds. Maybe if we can disturb their roosting each night, they will find someplace else to gather.
“I am calling this a victory tonight.”
