Index – Science – More and more Hungarian cities are being attacked by birds of prey

Three weeks ago, a family with two elementary school girls in Budapest watched in horror as a dolman crow taps the head of a flying pigeon, before it falls to the ground, then the crow awkwardly chases after it and with its strong beak – literally – decapitates its victim and starts pecking at the headless bird. (still writhing for a while) from Gerle’s neck. After a while, several members of the Dolman family joined the séance, and after the company got bored of the snack, they moved away, creaking and crooning.

There is nothing special about this, the dolman crow is a predatory bird

– ornithologist Zoltán Orbán, spokesperson of the Hungarian Ornithological and Conservation Association (MME), told us. They literally eat everything they can catch and swallow whole or cut into small pieces with their beaks, so they also eat a lot of carrion, especially in the winter.

leaving the nest, not yet flying, or only weakly flying, therefore landing their chicks a few or a few tens of meters away from anything bigger than, say, a mouse, be it a human, an elephant, or even the eighth passenger of death with a Bengal tiger by its side. There are more people in cities.

They don’t respect either kindergarteners or people with glasses

“Attacks” against people have increased in the past few years, in fact the above-mentioned reactions of fear of chicks, the reasons for which are prosaic:

currently primarily in Budapest, but also in other larger Hungarian cities, and since then, they have been more and more frequently hooking their beaks with passers-by. Just a few examples.

• They circled menacingly over people, and for older people, scenes from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic horror film, The Birds, might be evoked. (As it turns out, the film was inspired by a real-life 1961 mass seagull attack off California’s Monterey Bay by seabirds confused by the effects of toxic algae).
• There was an unsuspecting Hungarian citizen who had his glasses knocked off.
• In May 2022, a XV. they rioted in the district kindergarten, six children and a middle-aged woman had to be treated by the arriving paramedics.
• At the Sáfrány utca housing estate in Újbuda, they attacked not only people, but also dogs.
• But a “blood crow” in Újlipótváros has also received blood from cyclists riding peacefully on the banks of the Danube.

Since the dolmány crow chicks that grow up in the urban environment are most likely to stay here in the city,

But it is important to emphasize that this natural chick-fearing behavior is just an empty, loud scare that can be treated by simply shooing it away.

We are talking about this precisely so that people who live in the city and have little or no practical knowledge of nature know what it is all about. Until a few decades ago, even peasant children under the age of ten knew why birds do this – first of all, the chief rooster of the poultry yard, but the black thrush and the coal tit also, only the latter are not scared of us because of their smaller size – and after some waving and shouting scares, they went on, having a good laugh about it.

They were banned from District I, but they don’t care

Three species of crows, the magpie, the sow and the dolmány crow, have been living with us in the agricultural landscape for well over a thousand years, and the jackdaw was already our roommate in the medieval settlements in the towers of castles and churches.

because they have invaded the cities, where they obviously feel great in the parks, playgrounds, sports fields, around the roadside trees, they have caught littering, and where they feel so good, they are happy to spend there, while occasionally yelling at the peaceful citizens. At least that’s what the Budavár Municipality was thinking when it banned the rude birds from the 1st district three years ago. Since then, they have been searching for and after the breeding season, all the nests are permanently removed from the city district and artificial falcons are installed in their place.

They are fleeing persecution

But why did these basically cautious birds with a body length of half a meter, a wingspan of one meter, and a hoarse croak nesting in open rural areas, in groups of trees, in forest strips, move to cities?

The primary reason is that, while agriculture has destroyed (plowed down) most of their tree-bush nesting places and grassy feeding areas, hunters have continuously exterminated them in the framework of several campaigns, almost a “crow war”, and in the case of magpies and dolmany crows, they are still persecuted today, which is why they fled the to settlements where they cannot be killed freely. And because they are smart animals, they immediately saw the bright opportunity in cities crumbling from food scraps, which is another huge attraction for them, including the young of the new generations hatching from the eggs every year, explains the ornithologist.

even though people crowd around them, they don’t hunt (affect) them between the houses, so they can live and multiply without any worries.

The dice have turned

A vivid example of the sad result of the extermination campaign is given by those related to the Dolman people sowing crows, who were chased by hunters until they almost completely disappeared. By the beginning of the 2000s, 93 percent (!) of their quarter-million nesting population had been shot (the “black armies” seen in winter are the migrants from Russia and Belarus) or poisoned.

Today, their injured stock has increased to 30-33 thousand pairs, but there is still a misconception in the agricultural sector that they are harmful, even though if their natural feeding areas, the grasslands, which are also a priority in our country’s nature conservation strategy, are not cleared, then mostly with worms and insects living in the ground they feed, with which they drive an extremely significant agricultural benefit.

As usual, human greed and excessive destruction brought the trouble upon us by chasing the super-intelligent crows into the settlements, and now – along with the birds – the completely innocent population is drinking the juice of this irresponsibility, emphasizes Zoltán Orbán. And their presence still benefits us:

• only the dolman crows can make a meaningful contribution to the natural (and free) population control of the wild pigeons and the ringed pigeons, which have been urbanizing and multiplying dramatically in the last few years (while not eliminating the songbirds, contrary to public opinion);
• with their nests, they enable the population of forest short-eared owls – which do not build their own nests – to grow, which thus help to keep under control, also for free, the invasion of city rats and mice that breed on a lot of discarded food;
• last but not least, half of their food is still made up of worms, molluscs, bugs and other pests, whose stocks they feed on both in the cities and out of town (mainly the sow crows) in the agricultural landscape.

We can be hysterical, but we are their enemy

If we don’t learn to live with them, if we say that they have no place in the agricultural landscape, but that they should also disappear from the settlements, then what is left, complete extermination? Knowing all these causes and effects, will people, especially city dwellers, want this just because some birds protecting their young might scare some people? This is exactly what MM has been talking about for years – as Zoltán Orbán puts it – we can easily drive away animals that are much, much smaller and weaker than us with broad arm movements, or by hitting them with a bag or an umbrella and yelling at them.

We also need to know that, it seems, for a greater percentage of cases

then a specific subculture is responsible for releasing them (they even have a community group), because Dolmans who grow up with humans and then are released can be really aggressive. Because they are used to the person who raised them, that if they forcefully push and scream, then they get food. They have learned how to assert themselves against us and exploit their well-proven, bickering and teasing methods in parks, streets and squares.

The occupying dolmans do not aim to cause injury, they only want to force us to leave. Many of us just laugh at their rambunctious antics, but trouble can only come from someone taking them seriously, running away in a panic, and, say, suddenly stepping onto the busy road, or falling off their bike, or anywhere.

If a conclusion had to be drawn, it could be said that the Dolmans have more advantages than disadvantages even with their attacks. You don’t have to love them. Let’s face it:

But let’s also consider that the elegantly trilling, soprano-singing-romantic black thrushes of folk songs only moved to Budapest in the 1900s. But even for teenage children, it can be very scary to be attacked by a black thrush screaming angrily. However, intruders running around in the garden are attacked without further ado. They too. It’s just that they sing so beautifully.

(Cover photo: Attila Kovács / MTI)