The Birds

Posted by Laurie (New Jersey, United States) on 12 February 2007 in Animal & Insect and Portfolio.

We frequently get large congregations of these extremely noisy and messy black birds called starlings in our neighborhood. In the summer they are a problem, especially if you have a lot of trees and want to enjoy your yard. We had a few large trees near our deck which provided nice, natural, cool shade, but come early evening you had to retreat to the indoors since the birds would come to spend the night in those trees. Between the noise, which was bad enough, and the droppings, which were intolerable since it fell like rain, there was no way to stay outside on the deck under the shade of the trees or in the yard to enjoy a summer evening. The problem was so awful that I would have to scrub the deck and deck furniture with bleach just so I could allow the kids to play out there when they were small. It was really disgusting and frustrating.

Our neighbors had the same issues and between us, we tried all sorts of methods to try to drive them off. We used high frequency noise machines, cap guns to scare them, nothing seemed to work. We were told that if we just trimmed and thinned the canopy of the trees it would cause them to search for heavier cover and would still preserve our shade...well it sounded good but didn't work. In the long run, we ended up removing and trimming away the trees that hung over the deck just so we could use it at all.

This was taken a few weeks ago right from my front door. This was a "small" flock compared to what we experience in the summer months.

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