Published: November 09, 2009 08:07 pm      

Too many birds — 11/10/09

Sheer numbers make flocks nearly impossible to eradicate

The battle Lawrence County farmers currently are having with a huge flock of birds — mostly starlings, blackbirds and grackles — is not a new one, but its source can be traced to 1890. That’s when the first European starlings were imported across the Atlantic Ocean to the U.S.

The small black birds flourished in the country where they have no natural enemies, and as a result, huge flocks of them — some of them numbering several million of birds — continue to plague wherever they decide to settle, ravishing crops, consuming tons of feed intended for livestock, spreading disease and destroying the habitat species of birds native to this country. Some have even been blamed for causing crashes of small airplanes.

Let’s put it this way: If starlings have brought any benefits to this country, we can’t imagine what it would be. Unfortunately, they have become so numerous, that it is impossible to turn back the clock 120 years to when there were zero starlings in this nation.

Danny Blevins, 63, a third generation Lawrence County farmer, describes the huge flock of birds that is destroying his crops.

“The skies were black,” said Blevins of the birds arrival. “When they hit with such numbers — innumerable — experiencing it was something else. These guys would come in right above your head — tens of thousands of them. The sound of it, they would be in the forest close by and the sound would be overwhelming. The noise level would echo.

“When they would come in, in such numbers, it would be a rush of wind. The combination of the sounds and the sheer numbers, it would create such a wind velocity you could actually hear it like a storm. The field would just shake. It was totally black. It’s like something from a science fiction movie. I think I saw something like this in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’...”

Unfortunately, there is little that can be done to combat the flock until they decided to move to another location. The flock has taken up roost along Ky. 3 in the East Fork Valley Watershed in Boyd and Lawrence counties.

Residents have tried in vain to scare the masses away. After days of trying, they simply began harvesting whatever they could, any way they could.

They are hardly the first to be plagued by starlings numbering in ther tens of thousands. About 15 years ago, a flock even began roosting in an urban neighborhood inside Ashland. The noise level they created was unbearable, not to mention the amount of waste their droppings produced. The city tried firing cannons at regular intervals in hopes of scaring them away, but the results were mixed at best. Fortunately, the starlings soon moved on to no one’s sorrow,

Some 35 years ago, a flock of an estimated 7 million starlings took up residence at Fort Campbell along the Kentucky-Tennessee border. Not only did the starlings devour tons of food dialy and create a serious threat to the health of families living on the base, but they were a hazard to the helicopters that regularly fly at the base.

The Army received approval to spray the roosting birds with a chemical that caused thousands of them to freeze to death on a cold, late autumn night. The military had a lot of dead birds to pick up the next day, but soliders did not complain, They were glad to get rid of the birds.

About the only hope University of Kentucky Extension Wildlife Specialist Tom Barnes offered famrers now battling the birds in Lawrence and Boyd counties is the assurance that they eventually move on and probably not return. The phenomenon this year does not mean it will happen annually.

“They will stay there typically until a food resource is gone and then they move on,” Barnes said.

Barnes encouraged farmers to contact the Department of Agriculture and state or federal wildlife services for assistance. Those agencies have access to management tools including lethal ones that are not available to the general public.

Because they are not native to this country, there are few restrictions on killing starlings. Their very presence upsets the balance of nature.

Unforutnately, there are so many of the birds that killing them is just not practical. The best farmers along Ky. 3 can hope is to take their losses for this year and hope the birds do not return in 2010.