A question I hear a lot is “How can I get rid of the black birds?” The first thing we have to clarify is which black bird you have. The problem birds seem to be crows, grackles and starlings; with Red-winged Blackbirds sometimes ruffling the feathers of the home owners.
This time of year the most common complaint is about grackles, and the inquiries have started coming in earlier this year, which makes sense since they arrived about 2 weeks early this spring. I’ve been seeing what looks like like small flocks of grackles preparing for migration for a few weeks, but quite a few people confuse them with starlings, ( and vice versa) and sometimes even with crows. What difference you say.......the big difference is in how you control them.
Grackles are no doubt the hardest one to control because they like almost all seeds and especially seem to like the favourite of most small birds, the black oil sunflower seed. You can limit the access by using only really small feeders, removing trays and shortening or removing perches all together. The mesh feeders seem to work pretty good as well, but not excluding them all together.
The worst thing you can do is feed mixed seed, the seeds the other birds don’t like and fling out of the feeder are like a magnet to grackles (see my past rants on mixed seed).
If you do this you will cut down the numbers of grackles coming to your yard, hopefully they will move on down the road to someone else’s house with nice large grackle friendly platform feeders. I have a rather large yard and feed cracked corn in large open feeders and spread it on the ground in the fall. When I do this I rarely get grackles on my small sunflower feeders. So if you have the room get the 40 kg bag of cracked corn from your local feed mill ($16 plus or minus $2) and feed the black birds in the far corner of your land. If you don’t have the room, tell your neighbours how great crack corn is at attracting birds maybe even give him a large bag to spread around his yard.
I usually only go through about one bag each fall and I feed a lot. My goal is to attract and identify some rarities that tag along with the large flocks; and I have had success, a few Rusty Blackbirds and one Yellow-headed Blackbird. If you really want to make people take a second look, spread the corn in designs like crop circles, when a couple hundred birds are eating in the grass, you can’t see the corn, only the birds. I use an old 5 gallon water cooler bottle full of corn to “draw” my patterns. Yesterday the circle was all blue with jays, while we watched it turned black with the grackles.
The bright side of the grackle is that they migrate, (crows and starlings are a year round pain). They have already started gathering is large flocks in anticipation of departure, but if you have a problem now and you don’t cut down on the trays and perches, it is likely to get worse before they all leave usually around the same time the leaves drop.
If the black birds that are causing your troubles happen to be smaller with a short tail, longer beak and spots, than you have starlings. I’ve got good news and bad news: Bad news first? They don’t migrate. They will be with us year round, for ever. They are easily one of the smartest birds, well maybe smart isn’t the right term, they are one of the most “adaptive” birds at my feeders. So it can be a little troublesome to “limit their consumption” from your feeders. They wouldn’t even be that much of a problem except they travel in gangs (if that’s not the correct term for a group of Starlings it should be) of sometimes 50-100, bully the other birds and they devour only the most expensive food. The favourite is peanuts and peanut butter suet and they will be attracted to seed tubes with mixtures that contain peanuts and corn as well.
The good news is, it’s easy to feed the small birds and exclude Starlings. They won’t do acrobatics and hang off a small tube or mesh feeders containing only sunflower seeds. So the chickadee, nuthatch, Goldfinch, Purple Finch, grosbeaks and much more can eat in peace. They won’t eat nyjer, so you can feed all the finch, and they won’t eat millet so you can feed sparrows, junco and Mourning Doves.
The biggest problem with starlings is if you want to feed woodpeckers, more chickadees, nuthatch and Blue Jays. If you feed suet you will likely see starlings, you can limit their activity with the up-side-down suet feeder, it doesn’t work 100% but probably about 85%. In my yard, a cake that would only last 2 days in the regular feeder when starlings are at their worst; in the up-side-down it will last over 10 days. The starlings can only hang on for a few seconds as opposed to the whole day on the regular feeder.
If you want to feed peanuts, the quarter inch wire mesh peanut silos work the best, if you don’t use the tray, starlings will have a hard time, the smaller guys cling to the wire. If it’s Blue Jays you want to attract, try the peanut in the shell feeder, starlings don’t bother these and if the grackles become a problem you can move it really close to your house where they are quite uncomfortable to approach, the Blue Jays aren’t shy at all, they will actually come right inside if you let them. Last year I fed peanuts in the shell inside the door of my shop, but the jays got a little carried away, coming all the way in eating out of all the display feeders, that didn’t even bother me too much, it was when they started opening their own bags of peanuts on the shelf that my wife put her foot down. Even if they opened one bag it wouldn’t be so bad, but I guess they wanted only the best nuts and every bag was opened. (not to mention the droppings they were leaving behind on the new feeders). This year the feeder is back outside the window where if I show my face at all the grackles beat it to a more distant feeder, I still can’t fill any display feeders if I want to leave the door opened though, some jays seem to have a long memory.
If crows are a problem, the tricks mentioned above should take care of them. Make sure it is crows you have, it’s surprising the number of people who confuse them with grackles. We have a crow feeder, it’s just a box on a pole high enough to keep the dog out, any left overs and scraps that the crows would otherwise rip out of our garbage bag go into this feeder. We have maybe 6-8 crows that hang around and they never bother the feeders, they rarely even eat the corn that I spread on the ground.
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