I know this forum is about the joy that seeing a crow fly into an invisible brick wall can bring, but this offering is about preventing crow depredations on gardens. My father-in-law had a very large garden in the country with a lot of corn planted. he was horrified to find that row after row of corn sprouts were pulled up just so the crows could eat the grain that the sprouts were coming from. He wasted hours trying to ambush a crow, and added a very realistic looking scarecrow. He lost his third planting. He was complaining to me about it, and I remembered that crows would avoid any where near me if they saw I had a gun. I fabricated an imitation shotgun with a long galvanized pipe (painted black) and a stock cut out of a board. I placed his scarecrow in a chair by the corner of the garden, and placed the imitation shotgun across his arms. No more replanting of corn. A few years later, my brother complained of them robbing his backyard garden, and I prescribed the same remedy. He said that crows would actually detour around his property after the "armed" scarecrow took up residence. I cautioned him to bring the scarecrow in at the end of the growing season, so that crows would not grow accustomed to it. This is about the most cost effective way to remove crows from your garden equation that I can come up with. I hope it helps all the gardeners, and infuriates all the crows. (sorry I don't have any pictures, father-in-law is dead and brother is not feeling so hot himself)
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"When you have shot one bird flying, you have shot all bird's flying. ...the sensation is the same, and the last one is as good as the first." E. Hemingway "Fathers and Sons"
Great idea. Sometimes you can't shoot at them--as in a garden within the city limits. I know of at least one person with this problem, so I'll pass it on to see if it works with MI crows. The "city crows" here are all very sassy. They seem to know they're relatively safe.
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"Arms are the only true badges of liberty. The possession of arms is the distinction of a free man from a slave." -- Andrew Fletcher 1698
I used to work in a large facility where, of course, firearms, bb guns, slingshots, etc., were not permitted, and the crows that frequented the area became absolutely insolent. They would flock around on the ground like pidgeons, and would only reluctantly move aside to let pedestrians pass. I've no doubt that when they flew over the ridge that separated the facility from land that was open to hunting, they became the highly alert, suspicious, and gun-shy crows we're all familiar with. I'm pretty sure they recognized my truck in the parking lot. It looked like I parked under a chicken roost.
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"When you have shot one bird flying, you have shot all bird's flying. ...the sensation is the same, and the last one is as good as the first." E. Hemingway "Fathers and Sons"