I have seen this in Temple Texas, where the phone linese were sagging because of all the crows side by side on the lines.
I saw the news report on ABC world news tonight. Dang, what I would give to get permission to roam free downtown with my Diana. It would be like an african hunt to me.
My home town was Denton Texas and in those years when the grakle invasion came
every year the general complaint was the noise but worse was that stuff was hard on car paint.
I lived in a little house with a double lot back yard bordered on three sides by a 6' redwood slat fence there were two large pecan trees onthe easement of the three properties. Grakle hunting time picked them off from inside the back door and more than a few would fall onto the neighbor's well manicured lawns.
I always had that premonition of guilt of being caught.and one fine day it was the reckoning,I was cleaning the truck,and neighbor Burch comes over and says
Yall notice all them ded birds all over the back yard. I looked him in the eyes and said yep shore did its that epedemic I heard about all them Grackles
I guess they got to go sometime,there are thousands of em.
Looky what they done to my truck and I got back to the chore of cleaning it.
As long as I lived there every early spring We had us an epidemic.
Sylvan,
In the mid '80s I lived in Garland (native there--in the Ozarks for @ 20 yrs. now) near the original High School football stadium. There was a Grackle roost in a grove of trees on stadium property. Late in the afternoon the Grackles would fly in by the thousands---often pausing atop the old trees in my back-yard to rest a while. Adding insult to injury my neighbor to rhe rear had a huge, mature hybrid Mulberry that produced heavy crops of juicy berrys. The Grackles would gorge on the berrys, fly up to the trees above my patio----you no doubt know the rest of that story!
But everything gets old. One day I came home from work to the cacaphony of Grackles and the splats of processed Mulberries raining on the patio and I snapped. The resulting scene resembled an old Western movie with 'Maw' reloading rifles for 'Paw' as he fended off the 'Injuns' thru portholes in the log walls. I was ensconsed at the patio door with it pulled open just enough to get an airgun barrel thru it with the curtains pulled to obscure movement inside. I had my wife behind me reloading and passing a loaded gun to me and recieving an empty in return. The sky rained Grackles for a time before they figured out the area wasn't healthy. IIRC I picked up 17 off of the patio before hosing it down. I maintained the attack for @ 2 weeks before the flight pattern changed. At that point I could stand in the back yard in the late afternoon, look to the West and watch the Grackles headed for the roost actually split and bypass my house at a safe distance on either side.
Who sez animals can't communicate? Tom @ Buzzard Bluff
to Ft. Worth. Not in huge numbers but more than I've ever seen anywhere else.
Made me wish I could have had some time with a pellet gun. Airsoft in the hotel room helps a little though LOL.
