It’s strange that even in 2018, so many people are okay with littering. Kids who are learning basic etiquette can get a pass. But people who’re way past their adulthood don’t think twice before eating a chocolate and throwing the wrapper on the street. Even if there are dustbins, humans will leave around garbage and hope the wind will take care of it. And since we’re showing no signs of improvement, environmentalists have to look to crows for help.
According to The Guardian, a French historical theme park, Puy du Fou, has trained six crows to pick up cigarette butts and rubbish. The president of the park, Nicolas de Villiers said,
“The goal is not just to clear up, because the visitors are generally careful to keep things clean but also to show that nature itself can teach us to take care of the environment.”
The particular type of crows that are being trained in France are called Rooks. They’re known to be particularly intelligent and have also been seen to be communicating with humans. The technique that’s been used to train them is by rewarding with a nugget of bird food every time they deliver a piece of rubbish.
This isn’t a new concept because it was being thought about back in 2017 by Dutch entrepreneurs Ruben van der Vleuten and Bob Spikman. They wanted to utilise a crow’s habit of collecting garbage to keep our Earth clean.
Ruben and Bob came across an open-source project designed by Joshua Klein that worked like a vending machine for crows. It was called the Crow Box. The device rewarded the crow with a peanut whenever it dropped a coin. So, Ruben and Bob revamped the project, used cigarette butts for coins and renamed it the Crowbar.
The training process started by the drawing the crows’ attention with a piece of food next to a cigarette butt. After the crow became used to returning for food, the piece of garbage was moved closer to the device. And once they noticed that the machine gave it food when it dropped a cigarette butt, the crow began searching for trash to earn their food.
We can be as optimistic as we want to be about our Earth’s health but that isn’t going to change the fact that a major chunk of people aren’t going to do the needful. Governments can introduce schemes and boast about it but that will do little to no help. So, as it’s proven time and time again that crows can clean up our surroundings better than us, maybe they’re the future to a cleaner environment.