November 8, 2006
Singapore Takes on Crows; One Down, 34,999 to Go
By SETH MYDANS
SINGAPORE — "Garbage bin! Garbage bin!"
The men with shotguns tumbled from the Land Rover in a crouch and trotted along beside it like marines taking cover behind a Humvee.
"Don't let them see your gun, they know about guns!" whispered the leader, Dennis Lim, a 20-year veteran of this kind of thing.
He jumped from behind the van, whirled and fired, "pop!" But his prey — seven or eight crows sitting on a trash bin — were gone.
"They're smart birds," Mr. Lim said. "One of them saw us and alerted the others. He started flying and the others started flying."
Mr. Lim, 54, is on the front lines of a battle for his country's territorial integrity, a member of the Singapore Gun Club who has been enlisted to help reduce an infestation that at one point climbed to 150,000.
The club is one of the few places here that permits private weapons, though owners must lock them up before they leave. In 1982 the government asked the club to take on the crows, and Mr. Lim has been hunting them down almost from the start.
Now he is standing by for a new challenge, the possibility of bird flu and the need to secure Singapore against migrating birds, perhaps by shooting them out of the sky.
"I don't know what our assignment will be," he said. "The club has a contingency plan, all 50 shooters. The shooters will move if necessary, but I don't know what we will do."
But that is a concern for the future. The current scourge is not a trivial one for Singapore.
Crows are everything that Singapore is not — raucous, undisciplined, dirty and disorderly — and they are not welcome here.
They are the most annoying pest in this highly regulated city state of four million people, and unlike the human population they do not respond to government campaigns and directives. So they have to be shot.
"I myself have killed, I would say, about 40,000 of them," Mr. Lim said, working in spare time from his job as a Web site editor.
His one-day record, he said, is 197 birds, "shot, retrieved and collected."
But no matter how many he shot, the eggs kept coming.
"There's no way you can kill all the crows in Singapore," he said.
At every nook and corner of Singapore, mother crows are laying eggs.
Crows cluster near the Somerset subway station in the heart of the city and, as Mr. Lim said, if you clap your hands, the sky will go black with wings and feathers. They hop around at the outdoor food stalls that give this glass-and-concrete city a human face.
They find sanctuary in shopping areas like Orchard Road that might be called the soul of Singapore and that are off limits to the men with guns.
"The minute you fire at crows in a tourist area you get a thousand police cars," he said. "Everyone will think Osama is here."
From time to time, though, an emergency demands the shooters' attention in the busiest parts of town and the police will clear a kill zone for them among the housing units.
For nearly two decades, Mr. Lim said, the Gun Club kept the crow population stable. But in recent years, the government has hired a private security company to go after the birds full time.
Adding their guns to those of the club and working from dawn to dusk, the security company soon got the upper hand. The crow population is now down to 35,000 or so.
On a recent Saturday, on reclaimed land behind the airport, the Land Rover leaped and jolted over ruts and dunes, an unpaved Singapore few people ever see.
"You see any crows, you stop," Mr. Lim instructed the driver.
"Now, now, now, now!" the driver shouted and Mr. Lim leapt from the car again. The shot was off almost before his feet touched the ground and a bird plopped from the sky.
Over a Coke, Mr. Lim said he wanted people to know that it is not a love of killing that motivates him but a sense of civic duty.
"My wife is a Buddhist and she's against killing," he said. "Occasionally when I go out to do crow culling I do feel a sense of guilt. I try to explain to her that it's something good for the country."
"It's a job that nobody wants to do," he said, "but somebody has to do it."
