Scaring those crows

By FRITZ MAYER

REGION — The scarecrows that are on display for the Harvest Festival at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts show that these days, scarecrows are often the product of imagination and whimsy, and not necessarily an important agricultural tool.

But in days past, scarecrows had the important task of keeping birds out of growing fields on the farm. In fact, their purpose was considered so important that, according to one website ((www.scarecrows.me.uk/html/history.html)), the scarecrow’s chores were undertaken by live boys and girls who were at least nine years of age, who carried bags of pebbles through the wheat fields. If a bird landed in the field, the child, who was know as a bird scarer, would throw a stone and scare the bird away.

When much of the population of Britain was killed by the plague the 14th century, it was difficult to find enough nine-year-old boys and girls to do the job, so farmers created scarecrows to replace them.

Native North American Indians also reportedly used living people as bird scarers, but they were usually adults. But, they also had other ways of frightening off unwanted birds. According to another web site ((www.ancestryaid.co.uk/boards/history-board/11007-scarecrow-history.html)), the Seneca Indians “soaked corn seed in a poisonous mixture that would make the crows fly crazily around the fields and scare away any other birds.”

By the 1700s in the American colonies, people decided that neither live bird-scarers nor scarecrows were doing an adequate job of keeping crows out of the fields of grain, so many towns in the east put a bounty on the heads of crows. However, the campaign worked so well that within a few decades, populations of crop damaging insects and larvae were exploding because there were too few crows left to keep their numbers in check. The towns ultimately did away with the bounties, and farmers returned to the use of scarecrows.

Currently, there’s a bit of a divide about whether scarecrows, that is, the non-human kind, serve any real purpose in the garden at all. Some sources say that scarecrows can still be used as an effective way to keep crows and other pesky birds out of the garden.

But others say that scarecrows that don’t move aren’t effective because the birds soon learn that the scarecrow is not a real person and move into the garden anyway.

Whichever side of the fence you’re on, there are at least three local venues where you can view scarecrows that are an expression of sheer creative fancy: the Hawley Hoedown, scheduled for Saturday, October 3 in Hawley, PA (see page 20); Honesdale’s Harvest & Heritage Days on Saturday, October 10 in Honesdale, PA; and Bethel, NY, where the scarecrows are on view through the last Bethel Woods Harvest Market on October 11, when the winner of the scarecrow contest will be determined.