Has anyone heard of this?
From: dsmith
Date: 6/2/01
Time: 10:52:10 PM
Comments
Folks, I have a story to relate and I wonder if anyone else has witnessed this or even heard of it before.
I have 2 colonies of martins. One colony has 8 nesting pair and the other has 11. One evening I watched my birds as usual and everything was fine. The next morning, I had a meeting to attend that required me to leave my house at 9:00 am sharp. At 8:40 am, I had a few minutes to kill so I went out to watch my birds. I noticed a starling with a piece of grass hanging from it’s mouth sitting on the colony that contained 11 nesting pair. I watched the bird enter one of the nests that had been occupied by martins for several weeks. The next thing I witnessed angered me. I saw the other starling (I assume the male) enter another nest and remove an egg and carry it out into a field. He then returned, went into another nest and began throwing straw out. Then the female joined him. By the time I returned at 1:00 pm, the two birds had ravaged 8 of the 11 nests. There were a couple of whole martin eggs lying in the field, and many broken ones.
That problem has been resolved, but 2 birds caused me to lose an entire colony. The other three nesting pair were in the process of building and abandoned that site. None of the birds moved to my other site. Needless to say, starlings have moved to the TOP of my least favorite bird list.
Re: has anyone heard of this?
From: Mary Dawson - Whitmore Lake, MI
Date: 6/3/01
Time: 7:46:25 AM
Comments
I had a similar experience last year. At that time my colony was eight years old and I had never had Starling problems. I was eliminating House Sparrows and I did shoot all Starlings I saw on my property.
I returned home from work one evening and found about 50 martin eggs on the ground - and one new starling nest in a martin gourd. One pair of starlings had done all this damage.
This year, I converted all 32 of my SuperGourds to crescent SREH entries. I also added both exterior and interior porches to these gourds for better acceptance. My colony is full and the starlings have never even attempted to enter the crescents.
Please switch to SREH. Without them, starlings will continue to destroy your colony.
