Crows, which eat garbage and nest atop utility poles, have caused blackouts in Japan.

By MARTIN FACKLER

KAGOSHIMA, Japan - Spreading out in small teams, the men in gray jumpsuits scour the streets and rooftops with binoculars, seeking to guard this city from a growing menace. They look for signs: a torn garbage bag, a pile of twigs atop an electric pole or one of the black, winged culprits themselves.
“There’s one!” a shout goes up. Sure enough, one of their quarry flies brazenly overhead: a crow, giving a loud, taunting caw as it passed.
This is the Crow Patrol of utility company Kyushu Electric Power, on the hunt for crows whose nests on electric poles have caused a string of blackouts in this city of a half-million on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu.
Blackouts are just one of the problems caused by an explosion in Japan’s population of crows . Communities are scrambling to find ways to relocate or reduce their crow populations, as ever larger flocks of loud, ominous birds have taken over parks and nature reserves, frightening away residents.
It is a scourge straight out of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds.” The crows here look and act the part, with wing spans of nearly a meter and intimidating black beaks and sharp claws.
Attacks, though rare, do happen. Hungry crows have bloodied the faces of children while trying to steal candy from their hands. Crows have even carried away baby prairie dogs and ducklings from Tokyo zoos, city officials said.
While no one knows the precise number of crows in Japan, bird experts and government officials in cities across the nation say populations have increased enormously since the 1990s. Tokyo says the number of crows it has counted in large parks rose to 36,400 in 2001 from 7,000 in the late 1980s, prompting a trapping plan that cut the numbers to 18,200 last year. However, ornithologists say that the actual number in Tokyo is closer to 150,000 birds, and that some crows may have moved to different areas to avoid the traps.
Behind the rise, experts and officials say, has been the growing abundance of garbage, a product of Japan’s embrace of more wasteful Western lifestyles. This has created an orgy of eating for crows, which are scavengers.
The crows have proven clever at foiling human efforts to control them. In Kagoshima, they are even trying to outsmart the Crow Patrol. The birds have begun building dummy nests as decoys to draw patrol members away from their real nests.
“They are trying to outfox us,” said Kazuhide Kyutoku, deputy chief of Kyushu Electric’s facilities safety group, which conducts the patrols. “They aren’t willing to give up territory to humans.”
The birds seem to be winning. Mr. Kyutoku said despite the twiceweekly patrols, the number of nests keeps increasing, as have blackouts.
“Japanese react to crows because we fear them,” said Michio Matsuda, a board member of the Wild Bird Society of Japan and author of books on crows. “We are not sure sometimes who is smarter, us or the crows.”
The crow explosion has created a quandary for Japan, a nation that prides itself on nonviolence and harmony with nature .
“In the old days, crows and humans could live together peacefully, but now the species are clashing,” said Naoki Satou, the chief of planning in Tokyo’s environmental department . “All we really want to do is go back to that golden age of coexistence.”