Score so far: Sunnyvale 1, the crows 0
Green laser beam scaring the birds away — for now
SUNNYVALE >> As the sun began to set Monday, about the only crow that could be spotted in Plaza del Sol was fake — an effigy of a dead one suspended upside down from a tree’s leafless branch.
It was an eerie contrast to the scene that has played out there evening after evening in recent years, when murders of cawing crows would suddenly blot out the sky like a black cloud and swoop all over downtown, roosting in trees and littering city sidewalks and benches with their feathers and poop.
This time, the crows that put Sunnyvale on the map were warily keeping their distance high in the sky or dispersing into small flocks to get a closer look.
What happened?
Cue in the $20 green laser and turn the clock back a week. That’s when city parks worker Erick Delgadillo started taking evening walks to Plaza del Sol — one of the crows’ favorite roosting spots — and aiming the laser’s shiny green beam at the trees. The light spooked the birds, sending them flocking elsewhere.
It’s become a part of Delgadillo’s nightly routine ever since he was tapped for the job of breaking up the daily crow fest. When the crows start arriving like clockwork at around 5:45 p.m., he unleashes the mighty laser and shines away, then spends the next hour walking around downtown looking for stragglers to finish the job.
For now, the strategy seems to be working.
“Initially, they were kind of coming back pretty quickly,” Public Works Director Chip Taylor said. “But then, as we did it over a couple of days, it seemed that they left and moved for that day at least. But then they would come back the next day.”
Although hundreds of crows still could be seen soaring high in the skyjan. 24, Taylor said it was the first time they stopped settling into Plaza del Sol’s trees.
And that was enough for Mayor Larry Klein to declare victory in the city’s war on crows.
“We’ll see if we have to move the pilot program and expand it elsewhere in Sunnyvale. But for now, we’ll continue to focus on this location and hopefully we’ll continue to have the same success,” he said.
The Silicon Valley crows’ daily forays into Sunnyvale, reported by this news organization two weeks ago, have since made headlines in The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN. The corvids even got mentioned on a few late-night talk shows by Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert, with Fallon joking that the laser approach would backfire and thousands of crows would be replaced with thousands of cats.
Locally, people began speculating where the crows would fly to next if Sunnyvale really did manage to scare them off, with Mountain View emerging as the likely destination.
And last week a minor skirmish erupted when Berkeley Councilman Rigel Robinson spotted a pair of crows in his city, prompting him to inform Sunnyvale Councilman Omar Din to “keep your problems to yourself.”
The crows even inspired art designed by AC Transit candidate Alfred Twu, who subsequently turned it into a T-shirt by popular demand.
But just how long the crows will stop roosting in Plaza del Sol is hard to predict.
John Marzluff, a corvid expert and professor of environmental and forest sciences at the University of Washington, said crows are incredibly intelligent birds.
“One aspect of being smart is they develop social traditions, and that could be the place they roost, for example,” he said. “So getting them to change their mind from just being spooked one night. … They have a long memory of many good nights there, and they aren’t going to be as easily deterred as maybe some other species.”
If that’s the case, Sunnyvale will be ready.
According to Taylor, the city already has purchased a CD with “natural noises” — another common method of humane harassment recommended by the Humane Society — and is figuring out how to best use the sound without bothering nearby residents.
Last week, the city also hung a few effigies of dead crows around Plaza del Sol to act as an extra deterrent when Delgadillo isn’t around shining his laser.
The city’s tactics could go a few different ways, according to Marzluff. The laser may disrupt the crows and send them elsewhere for good or just long enough until the humans get tired and business as usual can resume.
There’s also a chance the crows could get really ticked off about the harassment and do something about it, although Marzluff assures that whatever that is won’t be scary enough to serve as a sequel to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 thriller “The Birds.”
“They could be upset, and the way that will be manifested is these aggressive calls and flocking and maybe some birds diving down at the source of danger,” he said. “But what our experiments have shown is what they really learn is that this is a dangerous place or dangerous person, and I need to stay away from that.”
SAN JOSE >> A big historic hotel in downtown San Jose has been bought by a veteran hospitality company in a deal that produced a rare event: The hotel sold at a loss compared to its price less than five years ago.
The Westin San Jose, formerly known as the Sainte Claire Hotel, has been bought by an affiliate headed up by Khanna Enterprises, documents filed on Jan. 20 with the Santa Clara County Recorder’s Office show.
Irvine-based Khanna Enterprises paid $44.9 million for the hotel structure and the land beneath it, according to the county property records.
It appears South Korea-based Aju Hotels and Resorts, the seller of the Westin San Jose, endured a loss in value for the hotel during the years Aju owned the property.
In 2017, Aju Hotels and Resorts paid $64 million for the hotel. 2017 was one of the years when hotels in the Bay Area and elsewhere were enjoying peak values and were crowded with guests.
But just a few years later, in 2020, the coronavirus shattered the travel and hospitality industries.
The hotel’s real estate value in 2022, as measured by the recent deal, compared with the real estate value in 2017 purchase, slid 29.8% during those years.
Aju Hotels, however, says it was paid $62.3 million by the purchaser in the deal.
A representative for Aju provided this news organization with a purchase document that showed the overall deal value for the hotel — including the price of the land, the building, the furniture, and intangible values for assets in the hotel — left the overall price at the $62.3 million mark.
That would mean the overall value of the hotel in 2022 was 2.7% less than the overall value in 2017.
Despite this turn of events, Alan Reay, president of Atlas Hospitality Group, which tracks the California lodging market, believes the Westin San Jose is a topnotch lodging.
“This is a beautiful hotel, a great, historic property,” Reay said. “It’s got a great location.”
Nevertheless, it’s clear that the arrival of the coronavirus appears to have undermined the hotel’s value.
“This demonstrates the decline in value for hotels that are in markets that depend on business travel and conventions,” Reay said.
In contrast, hotels in popular markets such as the coastal regions of Monterey County and San Diego County, along with the Northern California Wine Country, are seeing record increases in their prices.
“Drive-to markets, destination markets, are seeing incredible values,” Reay said.
The 171-room Westin San Jose is located at 302 S. Market St. and is about a block away from the San Jose Convention Center.
Constructed in 1926, the six-story landmark Westin San Jose hotel was designed in an Italian Renaissance Revival and Mediterranean Revival style of architecture.
The hotel was restored in the 1990s and was then known as the Hyatt Sainte Claire. Soon after 2000, it was renamed the Hotel Sainte Claire. After another renovation, the hotel was rebranded as the Westin San Jose in 2015.