I liked warching them. Kind of erie. It was dark and they were black. I thought it was bats at first. Anyone around here known that you don't put your head back to look up at them, esp with your mouth open in awe though.
Yeah, when I was at UT Austin there were certain places that you DID NOT park your car in the evening lest you returned to it to find it literally covered with droppings. Then they started driving around with an air cannon mounted on the back of a truck to try to scare them off. Somebody wrote a take-off of The Raven called 'The Grackle'. I wish I could locate it.
Once, upon a midnight boring, as I sat, alone and poring
Over many a quaint and curious volume of electric bills,
Suddenly there came a thumping, as of someone gently bumping,
Or a pair of hamsters humping underneath my window sills.
Scant attention was I paying, as my thoughts were gently straying,
And the stereo was playing "Greatest Hits of Ish Kabibble";
All at once, a vast, unpleasant grackle, black and irridescent,
Flew into my chamber window like a wayward dirigible:
Quoth the grackle: "Wibble, wibble!"
All unmoving, all uncaring, long he sat and watched me, staring
'Til I lost all sense of bearing and my lips began to dribble;
Then that grim and grisly grackle looked at me and gave a cackle,
And his hoarse and croaking crackle made my very giblets gibble:
Quoth the grackle: "Wibble, wibble!"
(Tom Laughlin) (excerpted)