Carrion/hooded crow

The graph shows numbers of crows Corvus corone culled per 100 ha of total estate area annually in the UK from 1961 to 2005. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.

Bag records of this species include the carrion crow from England and southern Scotland, and the hooded crow from the Scottish highlands, which are both predators of gamebird eggs. The average number of crows killed has changed little through time. There was a slight increase during the 1990s compared with the 1980s, which may be due to the introduction of the Larsen trap.

However, the change is considerably less than the population trend from the BTO’s Common Birds Census, which shows a twofold increase between 1968 and 1999. It is possible that the effectiveness of crow control is purely at a local scale, so that numbers have remained approximately constant on shooting estates while increasing on unkeepered farmland.