Dar es Salaam has a crow problem. And no, it isn't that crows have a particular problem with heart attacks (although they might prompt one or two).
It helps to take a little tour back to 1891 when the governor of Zanzibar imported 50 of these lively birds from India. They were intended to keep the streets of Zanzibar cleaner of trash. They thrived. There is certainly no lack of street trash still today, creating a continuing favorable environment. For crows, its a pretty easy hop from Zanzibar Island to mainland Tanzania. Jump forward to the present and there are 800,000+ of them in Dar alone. They like it here. Dar is a rich source for scavenging.
Crows aren't really known for being shy, retiring creatures. They are sort of the Ethel Mermans of the bird world. Loud. Boisterous. And when you put a number of them together, it's a pretty impressive cacophony. It doesn't take long to realize how much they dominate the landscape here. Yet that is due to more than their numbers. They kill indigenous birds and steal their eggs. Little songbirds are not up to the challenge. Nor the paradise flycatcher, not particularly a songbird (kind of crowlike), but a beautiful bird and definitely easier to love than a crow.
So, Dar es Salaam has embarked on a program to eradicate them. The drug of choice: Warfarin (a.k.a., coumadin), an anticoagulant/blood thinner. It seems warfarin is also used as a pesticide against rats and mice, and crows being rats of the sky, there is a certain logic.
But how do you get the coumadin into the crows? The answer is enormous room-sized traps, offering shade from the tropical sun, a roof slanted toward the center to encourage entry and comfy roosts inside. Crows being quite social with other crows, they gather together (I mean, who understands a crow more than a crow?). Add some coumadin-laced feed and you get dead crows.
At dinner last night the conversation veered toward crows not actually always dying in the traps, but rather, as intelligent birds, getting out and subsequently falling out of the sky. Dead crows littering the street. But! The question was raised over our vegetarian meal in a leafy well-heeled neighborhood on the Msasani Peninsula as to whether anyone had actually ever seen a crow fall from the sky. Hmmm. Well. No. Which led to the hypothesis that crows escape the trap, fly along happy about the easy meal with a tasty certain-something and suddenly realize they are having a brain hemorrhage and glide to a landing to their final resting spot. Hey, its an untested hypothesis... like falling crows. Yet they are undeniably D.O.G. (dead on the ground). They are then often eaten by the roaming dogs in the city. It's always interesting hanging with a medical crowd.
Then the conversation turned to the nearby US Embassy and Marines killing huge numbers of crows there. Which answered a question from earlier in the day as we drove past the embassy to the ZanTel office to register our cellphones: What exactly do all those people in The Embassy, a huge compound, do? Clearly the Marines need something more to do. And someone has the job, apparently, of counting crows, to know that they have killed some 200,000 (seems high, but who am I to contradict?), making for some very busy, quite productive Marines. Which is comforting, now knowing that if I go to one of the outdoor movies at The Embassy, I'm less likely to experience bird poop. I will, however, exercise caution and watch for bullets flying across Old Bagamoyo Road on my way to the grocery store.
(Thanks to Kim Grubbs for the title during our Skype conversation this morning)
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