Erding: No remedy for the crows plague

Erding - There have been rooks in Erding for 13 years.

The city then counted 64 breeding pairs.

There are now almost 1200. There is little that can be done about it.

It seems like Don Quixote's fight against the windmills: For many years the city of Erding has been campaigning for measures against the ever-increasing plague of crows.

The clever birds, which are strictly protected throughout Europe, reproduce here almost at will.

This makes the inventory development clear, which Mayor Max Gotz now presented to the city council.

Rooks have been nesting in the city park since 2008. At that time, there were a manageable 68 breeding pairs. In the meantime there are 1186 - due to the lack of natural enemies. Above all, the residents of the city park, where the main rook colony is located, suffer from it. They regularly report on the heavy pollution and noise from the animals.

Scare-off measures that the city has been carrying out since 2015 are only permitted in parts of the city park. This requires a special permit from the government of Upper Bavaria. The crow population in the city park increased steadily from 2008 to 2014 - from 68 to 465 breeding pairs. In addition, several splinter colonies formed in the city area. The largest of them are now on Keltereistraße / Am Wasserturm and Prielmayer and Bachinger Straße, as Gotz explained. There and in the city park, after a slight decrease in breeding pairs last year from 1040 to 911, a renewed increase to 1186 was documented this year.

In the deterring measures, the first of which was initiated by the then environmental officer Thomas Schreder after lengthy negotiations with the higher-level authorities, the removal of nests from the trees is permitted between October and mid-March, provided that the eggs have not yet been laid. This year, 168 nests were removed during this campaign. Costs: around 14,000 euros for the workload of the building yard, the rent for the lifting platform and the ornithological accompaniment for counting and documentation. The use of a bird - a desert buzzard in Erding - has also been approved, according to Gotz.