ROCHESTER, Minn. -- It got dark pretty early in Rochester on Wednesday night, but it wasn't due to an early cloud cover.
Dark skies in that part of the state can be credited to a flock of crows roosting in that city.
And it isn't just a nightly nuisance because crows have a nasty habit.
"You can just look on the sidewalk and see a whole bunch of poop, crows poop around," Nicholas, a lifetime Rochester resident said with disgust.
Yes, it's the blanket of white no one wished for this winter.
"There is a group of 1,500 to 2,500 crows roosting in Rochester still causing problems, still pooping where people have to walk," U.S. Bird Abatement Specialist Heather Gast said of the issue.
She and her team were hired by the city late last year to help rid the area of nearly 50,000 crows roosting nightly.
For at least 80 years, crows have flocked to Rochester in the winter to roost.
Gast says it is because Rochester is so close to foraging areas in farmland and it offers buildings to shield the crows from the cold to sleep.
Gast says her team has been able to scare off a good batch of the bunch but after nearly six weeks of work there are still a couple thousand crows holding court.
"Go outside in the daytime and the sidewalks are just covered with crow leavings," visitor Rabon Hensley said.
Tactics to scare them off range from laser beams and noise makers to large scales nets and birds of prey but one has to remember the crows have roosted in this city for nearly a century; it's going to take more than one scary winter to scare them off.
"We are probably talking about several years of work here," Gast said.
(Copyright 2012 by KARE 11. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)