Alaska Costco buyers say crows steal their groceries

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) – Some Alaska Costco buyers said they had their groceries stolen by crows in the store’s parking lot.

Matt Lewallen said he was placing his purchases in his car in the parking lot of an Anchorage Costco when crows attacked to steal a rib from his cart, the Anchorage Daily News reported on Friday.

“I literally took 10 steps away and turned around, two crows came down and immediately took one from the package, tore it up and flew with it,” said Lewallen.

Lewallen said the piece of meat was about 10 by 18 centimeters – a sizable meal for a sizable bird.

“They know what they are doing; it’s not the first time, ”said Lewallen. “They are very fat, so I think they have a whole system there.”

And when he returned home, he realized that one of the crows had nudged another rib, but he did not steal it.

“I cut the meat and started marinating it, and my wife said, ‘This is disgusting, we should get it back,'” said Lewallen. “Costco actually took it back even after we started marinating them and gave us a full refund.

Additional sightings of crow thieves have surfaced on social media.

“My parents were running their business after a store and they came home with one less steak!” Kimberly Waller wrote on Facebook. “The bird snatched it straight from the backpack in the parking lot.”

Anchorage resident Tamara Josey responded to Waller’s post and referred to the crows as “calculating”. She said that the crows hovered over her in an attempt to steal her groceries.

“I had two crows, one that was in the car next to me and he was squawking very loudly,” said Josey. “He would sit in the car and look at me, then jump next to the truck’s bucket on the other side and come and go. The other crow was on the floor. He kept trying to pull – I had those little melons you have in the mesh bags – he kept trying to grab the net and pull my melons out of the cart. “

A crow started to fly in a circle around Josey until she made them disappear.

“He was waiting for another opportunity to get the melons out of the cart, but they were never intimidated,” she said. “They just stood there, waiting for the next opportunity to steal something from my cart.”

“They are very dedicated to their mission,” she added.

An Anchorage manager Costco declined to comment to the newspaper about the crow thieves.

The Anchorage Audubon Society records the population of crows every December. The group reported 923 common crows in 2018, 621 in 2019 and 750 birds in 2020.

Rick Sinnott, a former wildlife biologist with the state’s Department of Fisheries and Hunting, said hundreds of crows fly to Anchorage in the winter to feed. After winter turns to spring, most crows will leave, Sinnott said.

But before they do, the crows are around to harvest various meats, fruits and vegetables.

“For years, decades, they watched people in supermarket parking lots with all this food,” said Sinnott. “They know what a fruit looks like in a supermarket cart because they saw it on the floor or in the trash can.”