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Trash Birds

© Mel. White

There's nothing quite like the fuzzy warm feeling a wildscaper gets when they notice that yes, their efforts are paying off. Birds are visiting the feeders and the bushes and there's butterflies and honeybees hovering around the flowerbeds. But soon enough the metaphorical snake creeps into your little Eden -- unwanted creatures invade your paradise.

Squirrels have their fans, but visitors such as grackles and starlings are almost universally hated. They're called "trash birds" and are shot and poisoned and when they're trapped they aren't relocated. They're simply killed.

But sometimes even these unwanted creatures can be welcome neighbors. Take the case of the much-maligned starling.

I don't know that I've ever heard anything good about this bird. I've heard that it is very social, lives in large groups, and roosts in trees, filling the ground below with droppings. In fact, outside my office, there's several trees that starlings roost in and the groundskeepers are kept very busy making sure the droppings are cleaned off. Their droppings cause health problems, they flock to feedlots (where, it is said, they eat much of the grain being fed to the animals). They chase off other birds, they're noisy, and they're an invader species.

I'm not the sort who poisons wildlife, no matter how obnoxious, but I was happy to let the cat amuse himself chasing the starlings until . . . . . . until the day I saw old Mama Starling (who built her nest atop one of the decorative columns on our porch) out on the lawn with her newly-fledged brood, teaching them to hunt insects in the grass. I'd always meant to sweep that nest away, but during the spring and summer it was fully of twittering babies and I'm not hardhearted enough to destroy a nest with young. During the fall and winter there were more important things to worry about. So the starlings and their one nest continued their life under our eaves.

I never thought about what she ate until that morning I saw her teaching her fledgelings to hunt insects. She was good at it, too. During the fifteen minutes I watched, she deftly gobbled down about six grasshoppers while her offspring watched and begged. After awhile they started combing the lawn for food, bobbing awkwardly across the grass in search of insects.

Athough her kind may have been less-than desirable around my workplace, Mama Starling proved to be a valuable tenant around the house. I set some seeds out where she could find them, as a reward for her efforts in policing my lawn.

Curiosity tugged at me a few days later when I saw her (or her