Do crows avoid places where dead crows can be seen?
I received a couple of variations of the advice that crows freak out if they see dead crows, so displaying dead crows will drive them off. I tried two different methods, including the “hang ’em from a string and let them swing in the wind” trick. Didn’t work. Don’t crows hate cayenne pepper? Another suggestion was the old “fill an egg with cayenne pepper” trick. I didn’t try this — people also believe it works with chickens, too, but it doesn’t. Birds don’t think cayenne pepper is “hot” at all. (People have tried controlling rodents by mixing chicken feed with enough cayenne pepper to make it inedible to mammals, without affecting birds at all.) How about scarecrows? I also built a scarecrow with an old pair of overalls, flannel shirt, and straw hat I had lying around. The thing startled me a couple of times but had no effect on the crows. Maybe tricks like dead crows or scarecrows work if the crows have a lot of equally good places to go. For example, if everyone in the neighborhood
