Problems and Solutions

Fall is making its presence known, the sumac is bright red, the cottonwoods are turning. The garden spiders look a little sluggish in the cool mornings. The light is changing as the sun rises further southeast along the horizon of my pasture.
My computer has taken a vacation from blogging this week. I though it was the wireless connection we have here in the country but after several days of problem solving attempts I decided to bring home a lap top and try the connection, ah-ha! I will have to take the desktop in and see what gremlin is running amok in it.
The small black dots in the picture above are starlings. A few thousand have taken to roosting nightly in some cottonwoods across the road to the north at night. They line up and stage on the power lines before heading into the tree. Its a sight, they all sit a polite 4-6 inches apart and nosily exchange some kind of avian gossip.
Last night at sunset I walked out and shooed them from the power line with a few loud rounds of applause. When we lived in far western Kansas this was a nightly occurrence at times. Starlings would come in from the feed lots and roost in the only large group of trees in a sixty mile radius, town that is. I would arm my young daughters with pots and pans and we would lead a noisy parade around our small home. The birds would arrive in flocks of several hundred at a time and we would turn them away with our loud performance. If we didn't do this our cars and sidewalk and anything left out at night would look like a splattered mess the next morning. Even our fearless Brittany would seek cover from the onslaught. It did pose health problems as well.
In college I helped do this chore with a group of students for a wealthy neighborhood in Manhattan KS. We had several advantages at our disposal, specially made shotgun shells loaded with loud fireworks that would explode in the air at around 100 feet, a large air cannon and taped calls of owls played from a megaphone . That was a spectacle, a dozen or so wildlife biology students and 1000s of the birds faced off at dusk each night for three days. We shot the shells, boomed the cannon and the owl taped played at piercing volumes. The flocks were turned. We thought we had won the battle, we even received a nice letter from the homeowners. I really think that we merely moved the problem to a less affluent neighborhood. Not unlike the bailout we saw last week.
Solving problems in the natural world is like that it seems, solutions are always connected to some other unforeseen consequence. Starlings were supposedly introduced into this country by a well meaning gentleman who wished to see birds from the plays of William Shakespeare in Central Park in NYC. If this is true I am sure he never intended or foresaw anything like the spectacles Ive described in Kansas a thousand miles away and a hundred years in the future.