The mess around Covenant Presbyterian Church, 201 N. Limestone St., is especially bad, said Ralph Beverly, maintenance manager.
“Oh you couldn’t see the concrete at all — it was at least a quarter inch deep,” Beverly said about the droppings covering the sidewalks in front of the church.
Instead of paying more than $2,000 for a company to clean up the mess, Beverly bought a power washer and he and another church employee spent hours this week cleaning the sidewalks in front of the church.
“Worst ever I’ve seen in the 15 years I’ve been here,” he said.
This has been a problem for the city in the past and even a wildlife expert was called in 2012 to help the city battle the crows.
Workers at Bill Marine Auto Center, 415 E. North St., spend hours every day cleaning off bird droppings from the dealer’s more than 100 new cars on the lot.
“They even rotate the cars around because most of it happens up in the front of the dealership because it’s right across the street where (the crows) nest,” said Corey Gossett, a salesman at the dealership.
Thousands of birds perch at night in the trees across the street from the dealership.
“There’s tens of thousands of them over there and they make a giant mess obviously,” Gossett said.
Wildlife experts have estimated as many as 50,000 crows call Springfield their winter roosting home.
Several downtown businesses and building owners have teamed up over the past few years to buy equipment to scare away the birds.
Clark State Community College has a handful of tools to battle the roosting murder — or group of crows. It uses a sound machine that imitates the sounds of predators and distressed crows. They also have boom cannons whose loud noise should scare the birds away.
The city of Springfield uses pyrotechnics cannons to scare off the birds from their buildings. City service crews go out at night and shoot the fireworks at buildings where the crows sit.
Those teams cost the city nearly $200 in overtime pay each night they are used, said Chris Moore, Springfield city service director.
“These birds are terribly smart,” Moore said.
Often the birds realize the distress signals are fake, he said, and they come back to roost on downtown buildings after the city’s cannons have stopped for the night.
“I’ve tried the laser light but it just scares them and they come right back,” Beverly said. “We’ve tried propane cannons and the bird scarer — nothing works anymore.”
If the problem worsens next winter, Beverly said he doesn’t know how the church will adjust to the mounting costs of cleanup.
“If it looks like next year is going to be the same thing we’ll have to do something because the dollar amount is turning astronomical,” he said.
The birds typically come to the city in December, Moore said, and leave their Springfield winter roosting grounds by the middle of March.
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