Sure you know about the biblical plagues of flies, gnats, frogs, and locusts, but do you know about the crows?  The New York Times reports about this recent scourge afflicting Japan. The article reports that crow populations are increasing and causing annoyance by getting into garbage and harm by causing blackouts.  Personally, when I lived up in Kawasaki, I walked by many brazen crows on my way home and often had flashbacks to Hitchcock’s The Birds.

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.

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 birds seem to be winning. Mr. Kyutoku said despite the twice-weekly patrols, which have removed 600 nests since they began three years ago, the number of nests keeps increasing, as have blackouts. The utility says there were three major cutoffs last year.

Crows have also shown a surprising ability to disrupt Japan’s super-modern technological infrastructure. In the last two years, utility companies in Tokyo reported almost 1,400 cases of crows cutting fiber optic cables, apparently to use as materials for nests.

This is really a fascinating article - definitely worth a read.  Of note is also the hand-wringing going on about what to do about the problem with some wanting to kill the crows and others adamantly opposed to that solution.