No one would need convincing that litter is bad for the environment as also public health. Besides this, animals and birds often eat litter thinking of it as food and this can be lethal for them. Still, we somehow are not able to avoid littering. Cigarette butts form a majority of litter allover the world and prove to be hazardous as they are non bio degradable besides being toxic.

Since humans could not be trained to stop littering with cigarette butts, as part of a cost-effective cleaning drive, a Swedish company Corvid Cleaning has recruited crows to pick up discarded cigarette butts from the streets and squares of a Swedish city near Stockholm. In a country where cigarette butts contribute to about 60% of street litter, street cleaning is an expensive task considering the high labour costs. About 75% of these costs can be saved by employing crows!

The wild birds have been trained by giving them food for every butt that they deposit in a bespoke specially-designed machine. As a reward-based training system, the machine dispenses a piece of food for the crow to eat in exchange for each drop-off of litter. It is interesting to note that the birds are doing this work voluntarily as they are not being held captive. They are free and wild birds but the fact that they keep coming back to the deposit machine with cigarette butts, indicates that they must be relishing the food that they get in return.

Considering the type of waste involved, it is important to keep in mind the health of the birds. Thus studies are being carried out to assess all pros and cons; and a pilot project has been initiated in a small area, before potentially expanding the operation across a wider area. Crows have always been considered as intelligent and resourceful birds, well known as social creatures with good communication skills. According to research, intelligence and reasoning of New Caledonian crows, (from Corvid bird family) can be compared to seven-year-old humans. They are proving to be smart and easy to teach. They also tend to learn from each other as also present a low risk of consuming the cigarette litter.

To quote Tomas Thernström, a waste strategist in Sweden , “It would be interesting to see if this could work in other environments as well. Also from the perspective that we can teach crows to pick up cigarette butts but we can’t teach people not to throw them on the ground. That’s an interesting thought.”

A hard fact indeed, that needs a lot of thought…

Watch this video to witness this amazing experiment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TklOxbWfRDM

References and Sources

https://www.greenmatters.com/p/crows-cigarette-butts

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/01/swedish-crows-pick-up-cigarette-butts-litter