Troy city leaders are considering hiring the U.S. Department of Agriculture to scatter flocks of crows that Mayor Carmella Mantello says number in the thousands, but not everyone on the city council is convinced there's a problem worth nearly $13,000 to solve. The Troy City Council met Thursday night to discuss the proposed contract, which would bring in USDA wildlife specialists armed with lasers, pyrotechnics and recorded distress calls to push the birds out of town.
Mantello told WRGB CBS 6 Albany that she wants to enter into an almost $13,000 contract with the USDA, pointing to a significant jump in crow activity compared with prior years. She said Troy has seen an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 crows in recent seasons, with the birds defecating on cars, parks and streets in years past, typically worsening as winter approaches.
Council President Sue Steele offered a different read on the situation. She said council members have received few complaints about the crows and pressed the mayor to provide evidence backing up the scale of the problem, according to the same report. Steele said the council has not made a final decision and is still reviewing the contract's logistics.
How the USDA Plans to Scatter the Birds
USDA district supervisor Ken Preusser explained the agency's dispersal toolkit, which includes crow distress calls, bird whistles, spotlights and non-harmful lasers, along with minor pyrotechnics. Mantello described the same methods, saying, “It's minor pyrotechnics, it's lasers — the laser lights. It's also some spotlights.” Preusser said the tactics do not harm the crows but do create unusual noise that residents aren't used to hearing, and that the USDA aims to give the public advance notice before any work begins, planning to send a press release and work with local news outlets to distribute it broadly if the contract is approved.
The work, if approved, would be a five-day process conducted at dusk, timed to when crows return to roost for the night. That mirrors how Troy's last USDA crow operation played out. In December 2022, a USDA Wildlife Services team was deployed downtown and in other neighborhoods with bottle rockets, lasers, recordings of crows in distress and spotlights, working from roughly 3:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. daily for five days, according to the Times Union. That effort was expected to cost the city $13,791, and the USDA estimated around 10,500 crows were bedding down in Troy each night at the time.
Families Raise Concerns Over Noise and Light
Not all of the pushback has been about whether crows are a nuisance. The council also heard concerns from families about potential effects on children with special needs, with some parents worried that loud noises and bright lights could trigger reactions in children with autism. Steele said some children with special needs may be affected by the sensory impact of the dispersal methods, a concern that factored into the council's deliberations alongside the dollar figure.
A Recurring Fight Dating Back Years
Troy's crow problem is not new. A 2009 dispersal effort used pyrotechnics, high-intensity lighting, lasers and amplified distress calls, and was notably condensed into five days rather than the typical two-week program, according to the Troy Record. A city operations director at the time suggested the effort could simply push crows between Troy, Cohoes, Albany and Watervliet rather than solve the problem outright, calling it “in some ways a vicious cycle.” That dynamic may still be in play — Watervliet, across the Hudson River, currently has its own USDA contract for crow management, per WRGB.
Winter crow roosts have been documented in Troy for years, including a 2021 blog post noting the heaviest concentration of birds in trees along the south end of Adams Island, according to wintercrowroost.com. Nationally, researchers have tracked American crow roosts in 110 cities across 28 states, with Breeding Bird Survey data showing the U.S. crow population grew by nearly 50 percent between 1966 and 1999, according to a study published through digitalcommons.unl.edu.
Other Capital Region Cities Have Faced the Same Flock
Troy isn't the only municipality to call in the feds over crows. Amsterdam agreed to pay roughly $8,000 for a similar intermunicipal USDA agreement, while Rochester worked with USDA Wildlife Services to break up a downtown roost estimated at 20,000 to 30,000 birds, according to the Monroe County Reporter. A 2019 USDA project in Trenton, New Jersey, had a similar goal of breaking a large crow roost into smaller, more scattered flocks rather than eliminating it entirely, per InsiderNJ.
Whether lasers alone can get the job done is itself an open question in the research. A study on crow dispersal found that birds returned to treated roosts within 15 minutes and that no roosts were actually abandoned, leading the study's authors to conclude that lasers should not be used as a stand-alone dispersal tool at urban crow roosts.
For now, the fate of Troy's contract rests with the full council. Steele said the council unanimously voted the contract out of its Finance Committee for action, with a final vote expected November 5. She encouraged residents to weigh in before then, leaving open whether the council will side with the mayor's warnings about thousands of crows or with her own observation that complaints have, so far, been few.
