A THEME PARK in France has come up with a novel way of cleaning up cigarette butts and other trash dropped by untidy guests.It’s trained a half-dozen crows to pick up the butts and other discarded small items, and to drop them into special litter bins that dispense a small nugget of bird food as a reward for every time a crow drops something into them.
The Puy du Fou theme park in western France attracts around two-million visitors yearly, and with the country considered “the smoking-est in the world,” it’s not surprising that the park – which is a fascinating re-creation of a French village of old, with some twenty-six different live-action scenarios in which actors play-out aspects of the country’s historic past – has something of a cigarette-butt problem.
And which its head of falconry, Christophe Gaborit who trains birds for those various shows, came up with an answer to by training a half-dozen crows to spot cigarette butts and other small items of litter, pick them up and put them into those special bins… with food treats as a reward for doing so.
The crows are a breed known as rooks, and according to Mr Gaborit they’re a particularly intelligent species that have proven ideal in training for their current roles.
And it’s probably no surprise that the good-housekeeping birds have been quickly dubbed The Feathered Dusters.
Puy du Fou is an amazing theme park recreation of a French village of old. (Puy du Fou)jpg
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