How to Train Crows to Alert You of Intruders and Pick Up Your Trash

Have you ever wished you could have a personal security guard to watch over your home while you’re away?

Have you ever wished you could have a personal security guard to watch over your home while you’re away? Or maybe you’ve wished you could hire someone to pick up your trash for you every week. Well, what if we told you that there is a way to do both of those things — and it doesn’t require hiring anyone? All you need is a few crows! In this blog post, we will teach you how to train crows to help protect your home and keep your yard clean.

A French theme park taught crows to pick up trash in 2018. Staff at Puy du Fou park, have taught six rooks that were raised in captivity to pick up pieces of garbage such as cigarette buds and place them inside a box that releases a treat each time rubbish is deposited.

Crows are surprisingly smart and you do not need to raise from birth to train them. There is a popular post from reddit of someone who accidentally trained a murder of crows to guard their house with surprising success. They even saved someone’s life . An elderly person fell on the ground and crows went crazy and eventually altered someone to get help!

So it is possible! From my research I believe these are the steps to get you the most success.

How to teach crows to alert you of intruders:

Location, Location, Location

• Start by observing where crows in your yard like to hang out. You probably already have an idea of where this might be because you ARE reading this article 😄.
• Leave some of their favorite foods out in a brightly colored cup or plate. Something cheap and that you can carry around with you if needed. I’ll explain why later. (N.B. for the color of plate — crows cannot see yellow very well so make it either red, blue or green).

Favorite Foods

Their favorite foods are generally small and easy to carry foods, such as nuts, hard boiled eggs (shell removed), meat (raw, unseasoned), berries (grapes, apples, blueberries), and insects (mealworms or crickets).

And let’s not forget water, in the summer months it can be a real treat for them — however, remember to wash out the bath at least weekly to keep diseases away and your murder healthy 😎.

Foods to avoid are sugars, salts and white bread.

Training

• After a few weeks of feeding them daily they should be comfortable with you being around them in the back yard. Next, try moving the feeding cup/plate closer to you while you are hanging out in the back yard and see if they come to get the food. ( Pro Tip: It helps to break eye contact and look away from them as they approach. It helps give them the confidence to get closer)
• At this point the murder should associate your yard with food and positive vibes ✌. If you have gotten this far you are doing great and your flying friends may already be alerting you to strangers due to resource guarding. As the name suggests, they want to defend their home and keep the good times going!
• If not then this next step will do the trick. Remember that bright plate that you feed them with? Well, the next time a guest or stranger comes by — try to bring that plate with you and some of their “special food” — the type of stuff you have seem them go crazy for. Leave the plate with the food near by where you are talking with your guest and just wait till some of them take the food. Do this each time their are guests.
• The idea is that when there is a stranger or someone that you are not expecting then you will not take the food plate out with you and so their will be no food. The crows will wonder why they are not getting anything and let you know very loudly that your silly human brain forgot the food.
• Bingo bango — free security system. Now, if the crows start to get aggressive with your guests then let the guests give the crows the treats as a peace offering. Eventually the crows will accept them into the flock.

How to teach crows to pick up trash

This one may take a while, but crows are smart birds.

My precious…

• Basically, crows love shiny things, so scatter a few balls of foil around your yard where your murder can see them.
• When the crows land to pick them up, put out our special bright colored plate with their preferred food.
• Hopefully they’ll fly to the food, with their foil ball in beak and drop the ball to eat. Then you carefully take the foil ball while pushing forward the food.
• Once you have that working, start dropping different types of garbage in your yard and wait for them to exchange this new ‘currency’ for food.
• You can get creative with it and say if they bring back plastic they get meat and if they bring back paper they get berries.

N.B. — Traditionally, training crows to pick up trash was done with a specially designed bin to dispense a treat when the crow dropped off garbage. However, since we do not have a fancy treat machine we can simply train them to deposit the garbage next to the bright food plate. That way you can come back with a bag and just collect the garbage since it will all be in one place 🧐.

Conclusion

As you can see, training crows to do things for you is not as hard as it seems. It just takes a little bit of time and patience. And hey, if your murder doesn’t want to cooperate then feel free to tweak aspects of this guide.