Blackbirds are Back

[Tin Can]

Twice a year, they are early https://stormhighway.com/wildlife/blackbird_starling_grackle_migration/

Millions, huge #'s in my yard and trees feeding in the yard

Very skittish, any movement of even a curtain sends them out

I would have tp pose as human scarecrow with camera and not blink

[Willie]

You guys keep them there and don't let them fly North. They decimate crops. The massed birds can wipe out a 400 acre field of sunflowers and really hurt fields of corn. Farmers here buy shotgun shells by the case to nail the pest birds.

[Renato Tonelli]

You guys keep them there and don't let them fly North. They decimate crops. The massed birds can wipe out a 400 acre field of sunflowers and really hurt fields of corn. Farmers here buy shotgun shells by the case to nail the pest birds.

I remember flocks of birds (they were black but not sure of the species) migrating and stopping on the hillside farms when I was I boy living in Italy; people called them "clouds of birds" - the next day, any fields with crops were bare.

[tgtaylor]

It was a treat to run into a bunch of these on a hike last week: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricolored_blackbird

[Tin Can]

There is no legal way to shoot millions of Blackbird

Punt guns were banned long ago

The flocks operate like one creature, dancing in huge sculptural patterns in air

Maybe eating bugs up there

A colorful solo black bird showed up today

[Willie]

211829

Image of Blackbirds on Sunflowers. Used with permission from my Uncle.
Shows what we deal with every summer. Many farmers here no longer plant Sunflowers as the crop loss is too high. The birds go after both the Oil and Confectioners seeds. North Dakota is the #1 producer of sunflower seeds in the US. The birds hit the industry hard.

[Tin Can]

Illinois is Pumpkin king (https://herald-review.com/news/local/states-largest-pumpkin-1-673-pounds-goes-on-tour-in-central-illinois/article_48640458-c569-58a4-89c2-8a0e9ff14ca7.html#:~:text=Joe%20Adkins%2C%20the%20four%2Dtime,yard%2C%20a%20fruit%20that%20weig%E2%80%A6)

too big to eat

I had one huge Sunflower in a tiny Chicago backyard

no birds, no bugs, now no me

BTW I watch Ag News nearly every day

and I was a resident of South Dakota not that long ago

[Drew Wiley]

As a kid, the owner of a table grape vineyard paid me a penny a blackbird and gave me the .22 ammo. Both me and a friend made ten bucks apiece two days straight. That's a hecka lot of dead birds. Made no difference. The big blackbird flocks were territorial, and exterminating them just led another flock to move in. The grower eventually went bankrupt due to the birds. He was in a less than ideal location for it anyway. No grapes, no income, boozing, then no wife - yet another country western song.

Entirely different from those are the melodious beautiful redwing blackbirds of the marshes. They're getting scarcer as the marshlands keep disappearing. Scarier still, the west coast monarch butterfly flyway has nearly 100% collapsed. Where millions of them would once routinely congregate, now there are zero. Milkweed-killing agricultural herbicides are partially to blame, plus deforestation; and it's entirely possible this famous species could become outright extinct.