I had no idea people disliked them. The main thing I knew about Starlings was their murmurations - large swarms of them undulating and swirling in the air. Actually recently a school friend of mine did some sketches of them which were pretty neat: https://www.dougieharley.com/single-post/2017/02/02/Starling...
Starlings aren't so bad except that they're natural mimics. In urban environments that means that they frequently learn to mimic urban noise pollution as part of their bird calls.
Here in NYC, you can have the police tow a car whose alarm goes off too frequently or doesn't shut down after a couple minutes. Not much you can do about a bird near your window mimicking the same sound with praeternatural accuracy every 30 seconds, all day long.
Somebody told me when I was young that in the late 1800s in Ireland (when he was young) that the flocks would be so large that they would block out the sunlight all around. He was not a man prone to exaggeration.
I had the impression they were like sparrows in that they swarm all over food sources and are in particular a scourge for backyard birding because they'll kill off the birds you actually want to see (and consume a ton of seed while they're at it).
I have a feeder I put about two pounds of seed in a day. Doves, red-winged blackbirds, brown-headed cowbirds, house finches and house sparrows all get their share. The sparrows aren't "swarming" anyone out. If anything the red-winged blackbirds are the bullies.
I have a bird house with a pair of sparrows. About 20" above that is a nest of breeding Robins that like a spot on the underside of my deck. The sparrows have never messed with the Robin nest in any way. There are eastern bluebirds nearby and the sparrows have caused no trouble for them either, despite the suitability of the house.
This "HOSP" hate is misplaced. Please don't hate on these birds. There are a couple pages on the Internet about the awful depredations of the terrible HOSP and so hating on them has become a fad.
House sparrows (and purple finches) are actually being crowded out by the house finch across North America. The house finch competes aggressively for nesting sites. But it's a pretty little bird so I don't expect any anti-house finch sites to pop up.
On the topic of creating more friendly urban areas for birds, it has been suggested that making the sides of very tall buildings more amenable to raptor nesting (falcon, hawk) that not only would it benefit those species it could help manage pigeon and starling populations.
That said, having had a hawk nesting site near my house there are a lot of feather piles to deal with :-)
some people argue that cats are decimating urban bird population (that is utter garbage of course), so bringing in more predators (who would hunt much higher proportion of healthy vs. ill birds than the cats) may not sit well with such heads.
The bird population is mostly decimated by urban and agricultural development. What little left is subjected to other dangers - most damage is during the most vulnerable stage of egg - the nests are raided for eggs by rats and people (wild bird eggs is a delicacy for many and one such egg gatherer can collect all eggs from a small city park in one lazy afternoon). Cats come on the stage in 2 roles, both are beneficial for bird population - controlling rat population and eating ill birds. Anecdotally, my grandmother's farm (as well as the farms around) had very bustling population of small birds nesting in/on the house/barns as well as multiple semi-feral farm cats roaming everywhere. And there were periodically piles of bird feathers&bones found in the attic of the main house where the cats had their den. There were never a rat or mouse anywhere on the developed part of the farm while i frequently saw those cats carrying a mouse in their mouth back from the hunt out in the fields.
even if the numbers were correct (which is a very big if) it doesn't matter much without context. How many of those birds were the old/ill ones who was going to die or fall an easy prey to any taker for that reason anyway in the next few days? Or do you think ill/old wild animals and birds get nice end-of-life hospital treatment and parade funeral?
Giving say for example 3M population and 4 years lifespan, 750K birds of that population are going to die that year. In nature that frequently means to be eaten. Somebody's gotta do it. Or do you prefer dead birds lying around (or rats feeding on the dead birds)? In many places finding dead birds is a reason to call Health Department actually.
I never said cats don't eat birds. What i'm saying is that they are doing service to the total bird population (and to humans - cats is the main reason human civilization was able to survive and develop in the dense highly unsanitary conditions like the cities of Middle Ages)
I used to be down with trying to restore things to pre-Caucasians-in-North-America conditions wherever possible. Now upon seeing that that would take constant and intensive human intervention, and probably still not succeed, I tend to look more toward post-human conditions as the measuring stick.
If all humans suddenly disappeared or stopped intervening, what would the landscape look like or turn into? Conditions would prevail that were affected by everything humans have done to date, but unaffected by any future human action. So for example, blackberry vines, kudzu, ivy, starlings, rats, and such, would take over, at least in some places, at least for a while. Is that bad? If humans disappeared, who would be around to find it bad or good?
Rather than fight it, I have redefined my ideas of "native" and "natural" to match these conditions. Because that's what "nature" is, right? That which happens without human intervention? Except of course tons of intervention has already happened and can't be changed, so the idea is to think about what would happen if the intervention stopped. Keeping endangered species alive or fighting invasives might be termed unsustainable and artificial under that view. I dunno, interesting thought experiment. To me anyway! LOL
>I used to be down with trying to restore things to pre-Caucasians-in-North-America conditions wherever possible.
you'd need at least a 300M bed Mayflower destined for Mars.
>If all humans suddenly disappeared or stopped intervening, what would the landscape look like or turn into? Conditions would prevail that were affected by everything humans have done to date, but unaffected by any future human action. So for example, blackberry vines, kudzu, ivy, starlings, rats, and such, would take over, at least in some places, at least for a while. Is that bad? If humans disappeared, who would be around to find it bad or good?
Chernobyl area. Flourishing nature preserve. Youtube it.
I've often wandered about spreading all species as widely as possible. Kudzu can't survive everywhere and maybe the new North American kangaroos and elephants would like it.
Yeah that part is a shaky construct, I agree. Which is kind of what got me started on this line of thought. The whole idea of 'restoration' that I used to espouse, rests on getting things back to a "natural" state, meaning a state without or before humans. So there's your separation right there.
I started thinking like, well too late, humans have been here. But just for fun let's pretend they instantaneously stopped being here; what would the "natural," "human-free" world look like then? It would look like what humans have made it into, plus whatever latent conditions we also caused but might be holding back by e.g. controlling rat populations or whatnot, plus whatever areas/systems/ecologies are and were always outside our influence.
It uses both pre-human conditions and conditions in places humans have avoided (e.g. Chernobyl) to paint a picture of "What if all the humans disappeared all at once" in both short and long term.
One hot nugget: The lower-NYC subways would flood almost immediately, and the streets above them would quickly convert into canals (from saltwater erosion), but the bridges would last longer without maintenance than they would under normal human use (because the biggest damage to the bridges is from road salt).
Wow, he has really carried the idea through. I'll have to check that out, thanks. Hilariously even the Bill McKibben quote on the cover says "...one of the greatest thought experiments..."
I had a pet starling as a kid. It fell out of its tree when it was a baby, I nursed it back to health, it got feathers and at about 1 year it started mimicking the sound of the doorbell :) All and all, a cool little bird.
My parents are obsessed birders and just about the only time I hear my mom swear is regarding a starling. It makes me wonder why there has never been a general order to hunt as many as possible. If the government paid $4/corpse, for a time, perhaps we'd be rid of them! (As long as we stopped paying when people tried breeding then for money, like the cobra)
Outside of my office window, there are always groups of them starlings chatting about. They get extremely noisy.
Not only they chased away much gentler pigeons, interrupted business negotiations with clients, they managed to pushed one of my designers over the edge who had a mental break down in the office.
Your designer suffers from mental illness. Plenty of people need help. The causes are as complex as the people and I'm pretty sure the birds didn't make him/her ill.
