Mojo Crow

My colleagues at the Wildlife Health Center have yet to catch their first crow—a live one, that is. (There have been plenty of dead ones brought in testing positive for West Nile Virus.) Crows are highly intelligent and not easily duped into captivity. So today Yvette set up Mojo Crow in one of the straw bales outside my window.

Mojo Crow is a plastic, life-size battery-operated crow whose wings rotate manically like those plastic flamingoes you see on people’s lawns.

Within five minutes of Mojo’s epileptic frenzy, there were over 200 crows circling high and cawing. They continued to caw as they landed in the eucalyptus trees nearby. But they didn’t come anywhere near, figuring that whatever had gotten to poor Mojo was probably going to do them in too. Mojo might have to be retired and something else will have to be tried. I’m glad I’m not the one having to catch them: this is really tough.

In other wacky news today, a Dodger baseball fan spent $25,000 buying out all the seats in a section of Dodger stadium beyond right field on the off chance that slugger Barry Bonds might hit his 700th home run there later this month (in which case the ball would be worth a great deal more than the $25,000). Well, Barry’s likely to get there well before then, so our enterprising fan has been selling the tickets for well over three times what he paid for them.