[eastforker]

[ClearCase_guy]

[JRandomFreeper]

Dude, free the love birds. Quick!

/johnny

[BradyLS]

Probably not, but they look like migrating Robins.

[lonerepubinma]

Union meeting ??

[basil]

What kind of camera do you have? Those are some pretty fantastic photos to have been taken at 12:34 AM.

[ladyvet]

We get those guys around our house doing that in the fall. First time I saw it freaked me out a bit. I don't know much about birds but the ones around here are definitely after bugs.

[Daffynition]

Swarms of birds can create some fantastic patterns...

[bgill]

The birds! The birds! Quick, board up the windows and bar the doors! You are so doomed, Tippi.

[Red Boots]

Those look like starlings to me. A flock about that big has a winter roosting site at the end of our street in a big cottonwood tree. You should hear the dawn chorus. It’s amazing !

[Ditter]

I have seen huge flocks of birds on our ranch in Brazoria County like that, we called them Rice birds. Not sure if that is their actual name according to the bird book.

[IbJensen]

Must be a shot of the House of Representatives. Too damned many to be the senate.

Nevertheless, both houses are larded with bird-brains.

[evets]

In Central Texas we have Grackles.

[notdownwidems]

They’re just resting!

[Chasaway]

Here's a bunch of fish...

Mullet schooling off my deck on Padre Island, Texas.

[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.

[al_c]

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

[hennie pennie]

Say, eastforker... are you following all the recent reports of ‘birdfalls’ and fish dieoffs?

[N. Theknow]

Used to see flocks bigger than that in New England in the spring with Grackles.

South Carolina of my youth used to see flocks of Cedar Waxwings as big as that.