This homestead is a bird feeder paradise, perhaps. At one point, when I was thinking of items for the blog, I did a count around the yard and found I had about a dozen different feeders of one sort or another. It stays pretty lively around here with lots of action, up to and including the predatory play of one of the local hungry hawks. Most of the bird play is a host of regular customers: sparrows, finches, wrens, mourning doves, pigeons, robins, cardinals, brown-headed cow-birds, dark-eyed junkos, grackles, nuthatches, chickadees, wood thrushes, and woodpeckers (and once: a yellow-bellied sapsucker)...occasionally a blue jay or two, a passing murder of crows, a lone Eastern towhee, every once in a while some goldfinches. Also, hummingbirds are not as rare as once thought, on this downtown spot of paradise.
The bad likes to tag along with the good, although where the line is between those two extremes can be a moving target. I've never minded all the noisy rotten starlings that get so active at this time of the year, as they fight and squawk especially around the suet pellet feeders.
But a couple has dug their way in under the gable juncture roofline on the south side of the house, way up where I cannot really do much about them, and I'm not happy about these home invaders.
They dug out the insulation that crowded them and they've been bringing in a steady trail of nesting materials, up to and including the really long strands of ornamental grass I'd trimmed a couple of months back. With the design of the huge entertainment space up there, and the routing especially of HVAC ductwork, they've got a path leading around the roof and inside the walls leading into the 3rd floor mechanical room, which is how this guy ended up flying into the pool table area last Sunday:
My exploration into more information about starlings has educated me, and not in their favor. They are an invasive pest species, threatening to native birds, and enjoy no protection under wildlife rules or mores. While I still have yet to figure out how to manage the specific nesters in my roof and attic space, I decided to experiment with additional mitigation options, which included a homemade starling trap.
I don't consider myself all that handy, and I have had very limited success in the past when I've tried to build things. But I was kind of pleased when I pulled this one off: a large attractive nesting box with a false floor that drops the starling down to the bottom, with no way back up and out...
...and a lighted opening to draw him into the PVC downtube, ending in a woven wire screen trap. This was my project back on April 6-7, and I put it up high on the back fence. So far, the only bird that has shown any interest in it was a bluebird:
Assistance and education for the starling saga and strategy have been helped along by the following:
"Build Your Own Self Repeating Starling Trap," from Chuck Abare's Purple Marlin blog.
"Euthanizing House Sparrows," from Bet of Sialis.org. [Last Updated 12 January 2017]
I also depended on a couple of YouTube videos to guide me:
- "Starling Catcher Bird House Trap!" from Kev's Homestead Hi-jinks. [Published 13 March 2021]
- "NB Starling Trap," from Jack Wall. [Posted 16 June 2016]
No comments:
Post a Comment