The War on Crows — and the Collapse of Hunting Ethics

Scott Darling of the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department has it right when he reports that crow shooting has “no biological impact on the population.” But that’s not the point. I worry less about what crow shooting does to crow numbers than what it does to the reputation of my fellow fair-chase hunters, all of whom lament increasing anti-hunting sentiment but few of whom bestir themselves to condemn crow shooting or even wildlife-killing contests.

Crow-killing contests, in which hundreds of participants dispatch thousands of birds, then landfill them, are even more offensive than crow shooting by individuals. Crow-killing contests are legal and promoted in 39 states. They’re banned, along with all wildlife-killing contests, in Arizona, California, Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Washington, and Vermont.

Darling also has it right when he says, “We do not support organized shoots like that simply because we think it sends the wrong message for our traditional hunting values. I think hunters need to be cautious about trying to create tallies of dead animals. We in the department always promote the respectful harvest and utilization of animals.”

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act prohibits recreational shooting of ravens. After years of persecution, they’re making a comeback in the East. But crow shooters, like almost everyone else, can’t tell a raven from a crow. When I walked into a taxidermy shop and congratulated the owner for his raven mount, he commented that in the decade it had been on display, I was the only person who hadn’t called his raven a “huge crow.” And those observers were viewing the raven from a distance of a few feet and when it was motionless, not when it was flying high and fast over a crow blind.

Crows can be legally shot in all states save Hawaii, where the endemic crow species, ʻalalā, is critically endangered. In most states, a hunting license is required. So game and fish agencies, funded largely by license dollars, promote crow shooting. When I worked as an information officer for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, I got bawled out by the director for informing the sporting public that crow shooting was “tarnishing its image.”

Crow shooters justify their sport with ancient bio-bullshit about how they make the world a better place by eliminating crows. “If you think about it from a conservation standpoint, crow hunting makes all the sense in the world,” asserts crow shooter Andrea Crider in Project Upland magazine. “Just like other predatory animals — think wolves, coyotes, bobcats, etc. — crows need to be managed in order for some game animals that we like to eat to thrive.”

And on a Bass Pro Shops page, Heath Wood offers this: “Several farmers will say that [crows] are a destructive animal, crows will dig seed out of the ground, will eat in farmers[’] cornfields, and the pecan trees in the southern states tend to be one of a crow’s favorite meals. If that is not enough of a reason to manage this bird, I found an interesting fact on crowbusters.com which is a[n] information site for crow hunters. It states that crows are known to affect the duck population, taking an average of 110 to 120 eggs off of the nest in one year. They will also attack baby ducks, bunnies, and squirrels. With all of these facts, it is easy to see why the crow population needs to be managed by hunters.”

A Century of Bad Science and Worse Incentives

Predators, our elders by millions of years, have never required humans to manage them. Predators manage themselves. Because humans have eliminated wolves and cougars from much of the nation, deer and elk overpopulate, razing forest understories, eradicating imperiled plants and habitats of mammals (theirs included) along with habitats of shrub- and ground-nesting birds. So deer and elk management by humans via regulated fair-chase hunting is appropriate, if not very effective. Game species compensate for mortality with fecundity. Predators cannot.

There has never been evidence to suggest that crows limit game or songbird populations or that shooting crows provides any real benefit to farmers other than psychological. But in the early 1900s, that fact didn’t impede DuPont, a major producer of shotgun ammo, from pumping out reams of propaganda in its magazine about the alleged evils of crows. “The record of the crow is like its coat — about as black as black can be,” began the first article of the series, in which C. O. Le Compte urged all sportsmen and all Americans to eradicate crows. “Crows,” he wrote, “destroy birds, birds destroy insects, insects destroy crops — therefore, kill the crows and save the crops.”

With that, DuPont announced that it was launching a “national crow shoot” for “the conservation of grain and the protection of game and insectivorous birds.” Participation, it proclaimed, would be an act of patriotism because crow eradication was sure to “prove an important factor in meeting America’s obligation to feed the world during these critical years [of World War I].”

Many states imposed bounties on crows. Some blew up roosts. Between 1934 and 1945, the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation killed an estimated 3.8 million crows with dynamite. The Illinois Department of Conservation killed 328,000 crows with a single blast. Texas and Kansas dynamited crows as well.

But even in 1918, the Bureau of Biological Survey was defending crows, noting that, while not guiltless, they consume insects and rodents that damage crops. “The verdict,” it reported, “is therefore rendered in favor of the crow, since, on the whole, the bird seems to do more good than harm.”

What Crows Actually Do for the World

Crows, like vultures, are apex scavengers, cleaning up rotting carrion and thereby limiting the spread of such parasites, pests and pathogens as hookworms, roundworms, blowflies, houseflies, anthrax, tularemia, botulism and sylvatic plague.

While crows eat commercial seeds, they also distribute wild ones, planting berries, fruits and nuts far and wide with their droppings. And by caching seeds and nuts, they maintain forests.

Fictional justifications for shooting crows haven’t changed in more than a century, but neither have fictional justifications for their existence. The same defense of persecuted wildlife offered by the Biological Survey in 1918 is today a mantra from the environmental community. Defending species because they’re deemed beneficial to human interests implies that elimination of species deemed detrimental to human interests is acceptable.