Hi! I’m Katie Winters, an independent consultant with Insight for Action.
Before all you 90’s kids start singing your own SWEET version of Mr. Jones, read on to learn about Portland’s highly contentious bird situation.
As the sun goes down each evening here in Rose City, thousands of crows return from their adventures far and wide to roost in the South Park Blocks. As part of their pre-roosting ritual, they chitter-chatter social updates. It’s quite a cacophonous experience!
As a systems-oriented evaluator, I see the crow-human interaction as one to be framed as a complex systems challenge.
We’ve got the crows doing their crow thing, seeking a warm spot to rest and rejuvenate at night. If that were the only thing they did, humans may not be bothered. But they also make a lot of noise and generate multitudinous splats of excrement that create problems for business owners. Have you tried to sleep in a hotel with thousands of birds chattering at 5am?
Portland’s city services spend thousands of dollars power-washing sidewalks and have even enlisted laser-guided falconers to scare the corvids away.
And then there are the people who appreciate them for their beauty, intelligence, and daily invitation to connect with nature. This guy is conducting a citizen science project to build evidence that they should be left alone.
How might a systems-oriented evaluator approach this situation? What values should guide the inquiry? What patterns should the evaluator attend to? Whose perspectives should be included… elevated? Should houseless folks be invited to weigh in? Can people’s preferences or economic interests trump the crows’ natural lifeways? How does the recent call to incorporate environmental sustainability into ALL evaluations bear upon any given approach?
When you’re here in Portland for AEA, I encourage you to step outside and look upward around dusk to observe this fantastic local phenomenon. Watch, listen, and ponder the lessons their flocking offers to inform your evaluation practice.
About Portland’s crows:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6cH5NPCDXo
- https://www.opb.org/news/article/portland-crows-map/
- https://pdxcrowroost.com/
Rad Resources
- Parsons, B. and Winters, W. (2023). Paradigm-based evaluation for eco-just systems transformation. Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation, 19(44), 24–44. https://doi.org/10.56645/jmde.v19i44.799
- Rowe, A. (2019). Sustainability-ready evaluation: A call to Action. New Directions for Evaluation, 162. 29-48. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ev.20365
- Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature: http://therightsofnature.org/what-is-rights-of-nature/?cli_action=1590604047.478
We’re looking forward to the fall and the Evaluation 2024 conference with our colleagues in the Local Arrangements Working Group (LAWG). Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to contribute to AEA365? Review the contribution guidelines and send your draft post to AEA365@eval.org. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.