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The Great Grackle Convention

© Carol Wallace

We have a rule in our house. Whoever gets home from school first makes coffee. Then, if it's nice out, as soon as we are both back home we grab a cup and race to the garden to sit and enjoy what is left of the evening - and of the summer.

Last week as we sat admiring the echinacea and trying to decide whether to pull out the rest of the nicotiana, we realized that we were sitting under a very strange shadow. Looking upward was like looking at a strobe light as a flickering mass of black and white passed overhead.

The grackles had returned for their annual symposium.

They haven't been gone, really. At least I have seen them strolling around the lawns, looking as if they were trying to get the chickens into parade formation. Between grackles and chickens we haven't had much of a problem with grubs or slugs - or even Japanese beetles. They are an absolute marvel with grasshoppers and gypsy moths!

They are beautiful birds, if you see them in sunlight, with feathers that at first appear black, and then reveal a rich iridescence in bronze and deep purple - something like the colors you see in an oil slick after rain. They can be bullies at the bird feeders, but prefer millet - so I fill our feeders with other good things and scatter the millet on the ground. In small numbers, they're not bad to have around.

And small numbers are what we have for most of the summer. Then comes autumn.

The evenings now are all the same. We sit, sip and, just before nightfall, notice a small flock of large black birds flying overhead toward the trees. Nothing very remarkable - maybe 20 or so. Our resident flock.

We continue to sip. We may even get distracted and concentrate on other things. My husband will change the pond filter, and I will inevitably leap up three or four times to pull a weed or deadhead a flower. We chat as we do this, until we realize that we are no longer chatting, but yelling at each other.

We have to. The grackles are drowning us out.

After that first wave of 20 (the party hosts, I presume) comes another, and then another, and another, Just when you think there can't be another grackle left in the world, another wave comes, seemingly out of nowhere.

They appear to have rules. No one goes to roost before its time. So all the birds who rudely arrived early don't get into their trees and settle down. Instead they fly in circles. They settle in a tree across the yard, then suddenly that tree becomes a swarm of black, as they all rise up and fly to some place different. This goes on until it is too dark to see.