Nothing worked, so I took to sitting in my lawn chair with my water gun and firing at them as they flew over. This helped a little, but it came with a cost: endless mocking from my husband and kids.
And goodness knows what went through the neighbours' minds. The annual blitzkrieg is usually over once the hatchlings leave the nest, and we can start to enjoy the pool again. But, last spring, I decided it was war when we saw grackles starting a nest in one of our pine trees. Armed with a long pole, an umbrella and wearing baseball hats, my husband and I knocked the half-built nest from the tree.
What happened next was like a scene out of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Within seconds, what seemed like thousands of grackles okay, maybe 20 descended upon us. We barely had time to drop the pole and run for the house. They swooped at our heads, attacked the abandoned pole and umbrella, and even the dog who thought it was afun game. They screeched, squawked and circled the backyard for hours. Eventually they retreated, the nest was rebuilt and the air assault carried on as always.
I felt like Wile E. Coyote after losing yet another battle to the Road Runner. But I wouldn't give up.
I upgraded to a Nerf water cannon. My family got used to my battle cry: "Grackles! I didn't feel the water pressure was strong enough, so I upgraded again — to a power washer. This was highly effective, but noisy. I sensed that my 6 a. Sightings at feeders are usually in the early season, most of us saw our first oriole when it easily flipped the bee guards off of our hummingbird feeders and sipped nectar. If you want to draw a few more orioles into your yard, place a few orange halves in an open area where passing birds are likely to spot them.
Orioles do seem to be attracted to the bright orange oriole feeders, but if you have a hummingbird feeder with large enough holes after the bee guards are removed they work just as well, then after they move on you can still use it for hummers. Orioles also eat seeds, favoring peanuts and hulled sunflower, suet and they love grape jelly. A few weeks after arrival they desert the feeder station in favor of natural food, mostly insects. A couple weeks ago I mentioned the Common Yellowthroat that was our predominant nesting warbler until a few years ago had hopefully moved on after our trees matured.
I was in Upper Coverdale last weekend and heard several males singing. We still have the Northern Parula and Black-throated Green Warblers singing steadily, with everything else it sounds almost orchestral. Hello Dwayne, I came across your blog when doing search for the dive-bombers pooping in my pool and wanted to know why. The parent then flies away to dispose of it. Or scarfs it down as a snack. But even though nasty videos of fecal sacs abound, scientists still know relatively little about them.
According to Michael Murphy, a biologist at Portland State University and a fecal-sac expert, only a handful of studies have been done on the subject. Despite this dearth of research, evidence suggests that fecal sacs have a number of uses. A fecal sac is essentially a diaper, says Murphy. Some birds have evolved a more efficient method of dealing with fecal sacs: They swallow them. The best guess—the one with the most research—is that birds eat fecal sacs because nestling poop serves as a nutritional treat a trait known as coprophagia.
The parent bird will then fly away with the sack and drop it a short distance away from the nest. And I thought dealing with diapers was gross. It you think that is disgusting, this next bit of info will curl your toes. Instead of flying away with the waste, many birds, including bluebirds, will often eat the fecal sacks.
Now there's a pleasant thought. Perhaps that will explain why bluebirds always carry a pak of Tic-Tacs. Most birds drop these sacks randomly as they fly, but often times grackles will target a specific dumping ground.
One theory is that hundreds of years ago, before so much land was cleared, grackles only nested along the edges of lakes and rivers. Grackles, which often nest in colonies, wanted to hide their nesting sites from predators, so they would drop fecal sacks in the nearby water.
Perhaps the attacks on our birdbaths and pools are a remnant of this behavior.
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