Meet the bane of my existence:
I knew it was too good to last. Those noisy, dirty, messy, ravenous Europeans Starlings have found my feeders and they told all their friends. At last count there were 55 of them.
Several birds arrived first (scouts!) and for the first few days the number of birds was manageable enough to just shoo them away from the feeders whenever they landed. But the numbers quickly increased exponentially, and soon I was jumping out of my chair every 3 minutes.
They are such pigs when they eat. If they don’t like a particular food they fling it on the ground. Since I use mixes in my feeders and there are dozens of starlings eating from a feeder at one time, pounds of seed ends up on the ground within a couple of hours. The squirrels in my neighborhood have never had it so good.
I stopped putting out peanuts, and I took away all feeders that had a peanut mix in them. That only slowed the birds down. They quickly switched to eating an entire cake of suet in an afternoon. I feel bad for the woodpeckers, chickadees and nuthatches, because I’ve had to remove most of their favorites.
My platform feeders slow the starlings down a bit—they can’t flick unwanted seed from side to side as easily, but I did spot this bird flinging seeds off the side of the platform that he deemed unworthy (“Ptoooey!”):
It’s been very cold here recently (nights below zero), so the starlings aren’t in any hurry to leave, even if their favorite food is now safely stored in the garage.
They’re also making a mess of my heated birdbath. The other day I nearly wiped out when I exited the garage. So many birds took a bath at the same time that they left a puddle right in front of the door which instantly turned into a patch of ice. The entire side of our house was plastered with frozen water drops as was the door which I was afraid might freeze shut. I drained most of the water so they can’t make as much of a mess, but now I have to add water to the bath every morning or the heater evaporates the water completely.
You know things are bad when I’m actually relieved to see a House Sparrow instead:
I hope I’m not stuck with the starlings for the rest of the winter, because they make my blood pressure rise every time they land in the yard. If they would just EAT seed instead of throwing it on the ground it would be possible to reach a truce, but they’re set in their ways and so am I, so the battle of wits continues.