I don’t give much thought to grackles; as I mentioned last summer, they aren’t a big problem here:
Here in California, we thankfully experience these loud, annoying birds only occasionally. But, when they move in, they seem to displace about every other bird in the area - save for the equally aggressive seagulls, and the hawks, which likely find them rather tasty.
But then there was Sgt. Mom’s post from a couple of days ago, comparing Jackson Pollock’s trash to multi-colored grackle poop. And I just saw a short blurb on Fox News Channel about using trained hunting falcons to control “sparrows and crows” at the Kremlin:
They’ve been doing this for quite some time; check this 1987 Discover article, which focuses on bioacoustics, but also mentions their use of falcons. So I thought, “hey, they should be doing that back east.” And, indeed, they are:
FORT WORTH – Jeff Cattoor found what he was looking for after midnight Friday morning at the northern edge of downtown Fort Worth: Hundreds of grackles squawking and making their customary mess of the sidewalk from the trees around Chase Bank.
Perched on Cattoor’s right hand, Blackjack, a chestnut-colored hawk with inch and half long talons, watched silently.
Then suddenly…WOOSH.
With a startling flap of his wings, Blackjack darted into the trees, followed quickly by a cloud of grackles exploding from the branches.
Too late. Blackjack quickly has a large male grackle pinned to the sidewalk, already dead.
“Once he goes, it doesn’t take him long,” Cattoor said, walking quickly to take the dead bird before Blackjack eats him and fills up. “He knows what he’s doing.”
Cattoor and Blackjack are part of No Grackle Left Behind, the latest effort to rid downtown Fort Worth of pesky, noisy grackles.
So Sgt. Mom, perhaps you might suggest this to the SA city council? Oh, and btw, a lot of people believe hawks prey on housepets, this generally isn’t true.
I would have thought a better name for the Fort Worth operation would be: No Grackle’s Behind Left.
I used to live in Fort Worth and can attest to the mess those birds can made at the downtown water gardens, a grackle magnet.
Go hawks!
Comment by sonarguy — 20060410 @ 1017
We had a problem out here in California with seagulls eating trash from a landfill that was miles from the shore. The “pollution” the seagulls deposited on the shoreline was hard to imagine. The ecologists had a easy solution: close the landfill. The owner of the landfill hired a hawk wrangler to chase the seagulls away. The seagulls, deprived of an easy Twinkie fix by their natural enemy, went back to a diet their digestive systems were meant to deal with. Since fish move, the seagull “decorations” were more evenly distributed along hundreds of miles of beaches, just like Father* Nature intended. End of problem. Except the eco-freaks are sad, the landfill is still open.
*It is a little known fact but Father Nature takes care of all the natural stuff that is “icky”.
Comment by tyree — 20060410 @ 1544
“Miles from shore” ?!?!?! Dude, get over it. There are seagulls in Utah.
Comment by Kevin L. Connors — 20060410 @ 2220
Kevin, I know there are seagulls far inland. I’ve seen them scrounging in parking lots in Idaho. I thought is was necessary to point out the location of the landfill because I needed the readers to understand the depth of he problem. If they were eating “miles from the shore” and “polluting” the shore, what do you think was happening to all of the people/cars/houses/livestock in between?
Comment by tyree — 20060416 @ 0102
Ah, I see.
Comment by Kevin L. Connors — 20060416 @ 0938