Meantime I’m more interested in constructive suggestions to help deal with a real problem.
There’s no real problem.
Josh, if you’d seen the starlings ripping apart newly hatched nestlings of tits, sparrows and chaffinches, you’d maybe take a different view. Starlings are classic omnivores and opportunists, they’ll find ways to consume most things smaller than they are.
Yeah, like seeds, berries and invertebrates.
What might be going on is adult starlings looking to evict the occupants of existing nests, they don’t really make their own, and they will eat the eggs. But, a starlings bill isn’t big enough to cope with nestlings, as stated they eat seeds, invertebrates and insects and berries.
I get possibly forty to fifty starlings descend on my Acer at around 05.30, and squabble like mad over the feeder full of mealworms, as well as the suet pellets. The local sparrows will give back as good as they get when it comes to space on the other feeders, and the blackbirds don’t care when they’re all on the ground after the fragments. There was even one of the regular hedgehogs getting stuck in with the starlings on the area under the tree last week.
Oddly, the last couple of days, the starlings have been leaving quite a lot of food in the feeders, which is unusual, and a bit worrying.
The birds and the hedgehogs cost me a bloody fortune in food!
