The Birds are Coming

thebackyard ^ | 12/17/2010 | eastforker

[eastforker]

I don't ever remember seing this many birds in one place at the same time.After shooting these pics, another wave just as big came through.

[DJlaysitup]

Could be African Swallows...generally non migratory though.

[Chasaway]

Here's a bunch of fish...

Mullet schooling off my deck on Padre Island, Texas.

[eastforker]

Amazing how blue the water is so close to shore at PI compared to the upper Texas coast. I know you got deep water within a 20 minute ride.

[Daffynition]

Lovely! Thanks for the link.

[Daffynition]

I love my mourning doves.

[Daffynition]

Much as I hate to say it...a BB gun works great! The coyotes clean up the carcasses.

[dfwgator]

Could be African Swallows...generally non migratory though.

What is their air-speed velocity?

[Red Boots]

Last year in Springfield, MO I saw a flock of whooping cranes flying south

I wonder if they were actually sandhill cranes- they are pretty similiar,make practically the same noise and their numbers have increased a lot, while I think that the whooping cranes haven't.

Sandhill cranes winter in southern Colorado and flocks of them fly right over our house in the fall. It's almost prehistoric- they make an unreal whooping sound, and they have to wait until it warms up to take off because they are so big.

[pillut48]

Oh, that's a lot but nothing like here in the northern DFW area in the fall when huge hoards (?) of grackles (really noisy black birds) show up when they are migrating and hang around for a few weeks--one of their favorite places is near shopping areas--we have gone into a restaurant and literally come out to find our brown van COMPLETELY covered in bird crap after parking under a crackle filled tree (one and only time we did that, but it was the only place to park)--wish I'd taken pictures but we were afraid it would damage the paint and immediately took the van to wash it--sometimes when we are at McD's in this area you can look out the windows of the play area and see the grassy space next to the access road all black with no green showing--while EVERY phone line, electrical line, tall signs, etc. are maxed out with birds sitting across them--hundreds and hundreds of birds. Sometimes it is so noisy you have to shout at others so they can hear you!! I always tell my daughter it is like the Alfred Hitchcock movie "The Birds" only worse! I am very careful to keep our windows up when we are at the intersections where there's boatloads of grackles--it's never happened, but I sure don't want any flying into the van! It's also fascinating to watch them arise from a field or parking lot en masse, wheeling around in the sky like a huge black cloud of bees, before they stop and settle again back in the grass or the parking lots or on the phone lines, etc. Sometimes they stare right at you silently and that's kind of creepy too! < shudders >

Here's a website where someone has videotaped a herd (?) of grackles gibbering to each other--in real life they are really much louder than that when there is a really large group of them! Again, creepy! Grackles making a lot of noise

[HeadOn]

Pillut48 is right. I’ve been there, done that, many years ago. If you look closely, you’ll see it’s a mix of long, and short tail birds. The long shiny ones are grackles, and the short tail speckled dull ones are starlings. We just called them all blackbirds. (or English blackbirds - we understood one of the species had been imported for pest control, and multiplied because they had no natural enemies here)

Back in the mid/late 70’s they were a PLAGUE in West Tennessee. There were MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS of them, descending on farmers’ fields and roosting in groves of trees. With that many roosting in the trees, the bird poop would kill all the trees, and pile up on the ground, making it risky for people to go in the area, for fear of contracting histoplasmosis - a NASTY disease.

In these large flocks, they are also a threat to aviation.

My cousin and I once stood in his yard as a huge flock, flying a hundred or so abreast flew by. It took them about 15 minutes for the entire flock to go past. It was absolutely jaw-dropping.

We had people all over devising schemes to kill thousands at a time. One of the best schemes was to fly a crop-duster over the roosting sites on a cold night with some type of chemical that would dry out the oil in their feathers, keeping them from shedding water. Then, if there was a fog, mist, or rain any time soon, the birds would get wet to the skin and freeze to death. It took YEARS to reduce the population, and now they seem to be on the rise again.

Me? When they landed in my backyard, I’d go out the front door with my shotgun and sneak around the house and pull the trigger. Never failed to get less than 3 birds, they were so thick. They finally stopped landing in our yard.

Be careful. They are dirty, nasty disease carriers.

[TexasRepublic]

We have immense, pestilent grackle swarms in Houston that would scare Alfred Hitchcock senseless. Like other denizens from Mexico, they are uninvited, loud, boisterous, thieving and crap on everything. Grackles should be the national bird of Mexico!

The most impressive flock of birds I ever saw were migrating Canadian geese that set down for the night in the rice fields near Katy, Texas. They solidly covered the ground over several acres.

[TexasRepublic]

“We had people all over devising schemes to kill thousands at a time.”

Back in the 1970’s, Houston’s mosquito control program must have been experimenting with some very toxic poisons. After something was sprayed around the Rice University campus, there were hundreds, if not thousands of dead grackles laying around the campus. I recall seeing dozens flattened in just one parking lot.

[HeadOn]

Yeah. I bet. Birds are often pretty susceptible to inhaled poisons.

[huldah1776]

Ah, I don’t know, I thought they were geese at first (I see double and have problems with distance). Didn’t hear the whooping, and it was so windy that the sound may have traveled the other way.

[al_c]

Grackles. Rats with wings. I hate those critters. Being a fellow Texan, I’m surprised you haven’t witnessed this before.

[eastforker]

Not in those numbers, no I haven’t.

[Dust in the Wind]

See flocks like that in the Arkansas River valley all winter...

[Daffynition]

The guys aren’t even going out much this year. Patterns are off for some reason.

[Dust in the Wind]

I’ve seen flocks of Canadas and Snow Geese over two and a half miles long in the past week near here. Not unusual...

[Daffynition]

Southern NE... ALL the small tributaries are frozen..not much shelter on our waterways. Somethin’s sure different. Have you ever cooked a goose? WE did for a Christmas... thank goodness I planned other meat b/c we wouldn’t have had enough to feed a hungry crowd. It was delicious [cooked in a convection oven]... which is super for game birds.