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.
“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.
Here in Minnesota we have the grackles and red winged black birds. Just south of us there are yellow headed black birds. During the grackles flight South in October I would sit out on the deck and watch them fly in the same flight path every night. Thousands of them would fly across my back yard during the evening hours. If it was legal I would have liked to take some pot shots at them with the shotgun.