Good call by Modesto, downtown partnership to push pesky, pooping pariahs elsewhere
Using birds of prey to scare starlings from downtown Modesto is an intriguing, nonlethal solution to a messy problem.
Let’s pray it works.
It’s no fun to park on a downtown street and return some time later to find your vehicle splattered with bird droppings. Even worse is getting bombed on one’s person. Nothing will ruin your appetite faster than a plop of poop on your plate while dining al fresco at any of our fine downtown restaurants’ outside seating.
Kudos to the Downtown Modesto Partnership and the city for partnering to hire a falconer to haze, or frighten away, tens of thousands of starlings.
They’re actually using a Harris hawk, a raptor more suited to urban areas.
Complaints may be expected. Anytime you tinker with nature, you’re bound to upset someone.
The Modesto Bee’s Deke Farrow, for Sunday’s front-page article, found some people who adore “the beautiful aerial ballet the birds do in the evening” when hundreds swoop and turn and whirl in unison. The fanciful flight pattern is called a murmuration, and it is fascinating. Others like the sound of chirping.
Die-hard bird watchers, however, won’t all flock to the starlings’ defense. They’re well aware that glossy black starlings are an invasive species, introduced from Europe more than a century ago, and that they aggressively take over nests of other birds, often displacing more polite and vulnerable native species.
The birds’ waste can corrode rooftops equipment, too, like heating and air conditioning and solar panels.
Let’s face it: starlings are pests.
It’s expensive and labor-intensive to pressure-wash whole blocks of downtown streets every day or two, including popular venues like Tenth Street Plaza. And it’s unhealthy; droppings can cause air-borne lung infections, we learned in a Bee report in 2012, when the starling population exploded in a particularly messy autumn.
The birds forage for food in fields in the daytime, returning to roost at night downtown where concrete and asphalt are warmer. They generally move on when the weather turns colder. While they’re here, they’re a pain.
When a raptor circulates, startled starlings flee. Through sheer intimidation, a hawk or falcon moved about downtown by its trainer is an effective deterrent, succeeding where cannons, recordings, netting and plastic owls don’t.
Downtown — driving the economic and cultural heartbeat of Modesto — is more likely to prosper if it’s clean and welcoming. The Downtown Modesto Partnership and City Hall should find hiring Airstrike Bird Control well worth the $15,000 cost.
