Grackle

I have a bird feeder.  I like to see birds very happily flutter around it & eat.  In general, I'd love to have many, many different kinds of birds, but over time it gets overrun with sparrows with the occasional dove, blue jay & cardinal hanging around.  I'd prefer a few more finches.

I bought the kind of bird feeder which is supposed to be primarily for small birds, "songbirds."  It has a circular metal grill that surrounds it which should only allow birds of a certain size, but because seed falls to the feeder floor, a larger bird can grasp the feeder & stick its head in.(*)  I don't always mind when it's a lovely bird, like a cardinal, although the bigger birds do tend to shoo the smaller birds away.

At some point recently, though, the most hated of birds descended upon my feeder: the grackle.  Suddenly they were everywhere, & they're big bullies, & they were battering the bird feeder to make the seed inside fall to the ground.  Big & stupid is one thing - big & smart is a bad combination.

In Austin, the grackles rule the University of Texas campus.  They are a trouble for the entire city - as this recent article in the city's "newspaper" reports.  They are such a fact of life that the smell of their excrement, their screeches from the trees at sunset & otherwise, & the ever-present danger of being shat upon as you wander across campus, all these things are almost taken for granted.

But in Kentucky?  I suppose I would see them in parking lots, but not in neighborhoods.

Eventually, I had to remove the bird feeder.  Just stepping outside, I could hear their calls, which sound like a sick animal clearing its throat, & they'd be visible at the tops of trees as the leaves were slowly coming back, at the end of winter/beginning of spring.  I imagined they were calling me names, but I know they're resourceful birds who can survive on most everything.  It was, as always, the smaller creatures that suffered.  All these grackles, everywhere, making noise that reminded me a little of home.

Until this past week.  I noticed the grackles had gone.  I put the bird feeder back out.  So far, no big bully-bird to bother the others.  & of course I have even seen a few finches, though of course the sparrows will probably crowd them away.  The sparrows have one thing the grackles don't have - they're awful cute.

I'm not anywhere near an amateur ornithologist, but I wonder: do grackles just come to my neighborhood to breed in early spring?  Do they go somewhere else when their children can fly?  I've asked a couple of people who've lived here a long time, but they didn't know what a grackle was.  Lucky souls!

I just hope it wasn't my bird feeder that brought them here in the first place.

(*) It's also supposed to protect from squirrels, although I've caught very young squirrels leaping into it from tall branches.