Trouble with the wildlife

Nay, I will; that's flat:
He said he would not ransom Mortimer;
Forbad my tongue to speak of Mortimer;
But I will find him when he lies asleep,
And in his ear I'll holla 'Mortimer!'
Nay,
I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak
Nothing but 'Mortimer,' and give it him
To keep his anger still in motion.

-Hotspur, Henry IV Part 1, Shakespeare

The sun is shining, the wind is howling out of the east strong enough to make the dock lines creak and the rigging sing.  Cool too, 50 degrees in the cockpit.  SCAs posted for the Channel so the flock is definitely in the pasture.  I’m huddled below with the radio and the heater.

So what’s with the Shakespeare quote, you ask?  Are you still catching us up on the voyage?  And the answer to the last question is, not today.  There’s a story with the first one.

The verbiage above comes in the first act when several conspirators are plotting against the king.  Hotspur is suggesting using a starling as an audio weapon in an attempt to drive him crazy.  With those words, old Will and a willing groupie with too many dollars and not enough sense unleashed a nasty pest upon the North American continent and specifically Channel Islands Harbor.  I’m talking the common starling, AKA European starling, and to those of a scientific bent, Sturnus vulgaris.  Back in the late Nineteenth Century, Eugene Schieffelin and some other mis-guided wealthy members of an organization dedicated to introducing foreign species into North America for economic reasons decided it would be cool to introduce all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare plays.  So in 1891, they released several dozen European starlings in Central Park.

I wonder if they even read the play.  I mean the plotters were proposing the bird be used as an irritant.  Maybe they thought the starling song would be a beautiful addition to our environs, totally missing the irritant thing.  Now don’t get me wrong, starlings are pretty amazing birds.  They are related to mynahs and can mimic other birds.  They are very social and gather in flocks termed murmurations that in flight are astounding to watch.  They eat insects which is almost always a good thing.

Cool vid of starling murmurations 

But they also eat fruit and that’s not a good thing for a couple of reasons.  The berry farmers around here hate them as they cause hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage to their crops.  It also causes their guano to be acidic and staining.  Municipalities have spent millions dealing with the maintenance issues caused by the birds.  Remember they are a very gregarious species so it’s never just one bird, it’s hundreds.

Which brings me to what initiated this missive.  I got back to the boat one day and found the port deck and the sail cover covered in colored bird poop.  Now I haven’t told you yet of the new paint on the boat.  It has gotten a very expensive paint job during the stay here.  So I got out the deck brush and went to work.  I realized after a few minutes that I needed greater fire power so I broke out the pressure washer.  Two hours later the boat was clean but the deck was stained in a few places.  I was not happy.  The next day same thing, port deck nailed with colored poop, two more hours with the pressure washer and another stain or two.

After the third day I was getting pretty steamed and very puzzled.  I knew it had to be a flock of birds but had no idea what they were as I hadn’t seen them.  Finally, one evening I was returning when I saw about twenty little black birds clinging to the stays and shrouds above the upper spreaders.  My first thought was, how cool is that as they engaged in pecking order games on the shrouds, chirping and…defecating.  Oh no!  It finally dawned on me.  I ran to the boat, grabbed the nearest shroud and gave it a good shake.  They all took off at once, circling and wheeling and then realighting on the rigging.  Another shake and they again took flight some deciding that maybe the neighbor’s mast might be a little more accommodating.  At that point I realized that of the fifteen or so sail boats I share this basin with the little birds only preferred 5 or 6.  Finally, all the birds, maybe 150 from my and the other boats, left the rigging and disappeared into the nearby palm trees.  It was sundown.

It took several more days to observe their arrival in groups of 3 to 5 out of the east, looking like little black missiles with wings showing up approximately 40 minutes before sundown.  Then they roost in the rigging.  And then at sundown they repair to their nests in the palms.  And they seem to prefer the taller masts nearest the trees.

But what were they and how to dissuade them from using Blue Note as a pre-nighttime outhouse?  I only have one bird book aboard, Guide to the Birds of Alaska by R H Armstrong.  Not expecting much I dove in and after an hour the closest culprit looked to be the European starling.  The bill and the body shape were right but the ones in my rigging didn’t have spots.  More time with Wikipedia confirmed them and provided their history, behavior, habitat, etc.  I now knew who the enemy was, a strawberry-gobbling, gregarious, intelligent, fastidious, invasive bird with no known predators.

What to do?  Apparently some maintenance departments have had some success stringing nets over those items needing protection, not a solution for me.  Shiny objects strung in the rigging initially seemed to work but only for several days.  To date, the only effective method for preventing deck damage has been to stand by, waiting for a bird to land and then shaking the rigging until they fly off.  This is kept up until all the berries have been processed or sundown occurs.  Miss a day for whatever reason and two hours of fun with the pressure washer ensues.  All is not bad though as I have been providing amusement for all my live-aboard neighbors.  They understand after I explain it, but I can see the visual humor of seeing an old, fat hippie randomly jumping out and shaking a shroud.  I call it bird doody.  Thanks a lot Will.

-ap