Starling Surprise!

At this time of the year our garden is inundated with European Starlings (Sturnus Vulgaris). Noisy and gregarious, and eating everything from grasshoppers to fruit to dog pellets, they arrive in a cloud, breed like crazy and then one day, they are gone!

Until next year!

An adult bird in breeding plumage.

Now, we love birds, every kind, it doesn't matter if they are scavengers or exotic feathered beauties. We feed them all. We have four bird baths in the garden and one outside (mainly for the passing canines), and we go through kilos of bird feed and apples and litres of sugar water for the nectar feeders. We have wrestled learner-flyers from the jaws of furious felines, and for a few years running we were unable to relax on our veranda because the malachite sunbirds decided to build their nest and raise their young in a small tree in a barrel for two years and a hanging ornament for one year!

The completed nest on the veranda.

We have erected logs for the barbets and have discovered several nests hidden in our shrubs and trees. We have watched the weavers strip our Dietes Grandiflora leaves and then fly off with bits trailing in their beaks to build in the thorn trees in a neighbour's garden!

They have long strappy leaves that the weavers love!

So, as you see, we love the bird life that frequents our garden. We have recorded over thirty different species to visit our garden over the years since we have been here.

A male weaver in the bird bath in my re-constructed corner!

But.

We draw the line at the starlings nesting in our roof! They tried to build under the eaves a year ago, but Rob stopped them by forcing stones into the gaps, so they moved into the abandoned barbet's log. That worked for a time. But, they remained adamant that they would find a place in the roof. (The builder did promise us walls that went straight up and met the roof, but it somehow got lost in the translation and we have poles and lots of places for the birds to sit and build nests!)

We have a 'sticky-out' window upstairs that has a gap of maybe three centimetres between the two sets of roof meeting.

And a week or so ago a pair of starlings decided that this would be a great place to make a nest. Under protection, out of the weather, soft insulation and food only a short flight away. They have forced their way in through this tiny gap and are now busy bringing in nesting material!

But the noise!

They start early in the morning, and it gets light here early now. The sound of them forcing their way in, scrabbling on the metal roof and then arranging the nesting area against the wooden ceiling, sounds as though they are working with  jackhammers. And they wake us up! Alfie gets twitchy and the cats stare at the ceiling willing something to fall through.

Rob decided that we needed to stop them before they started to get too comfortable and lay eggs, so we would rush out onto the balcony upstairs and wave our arms and shout 'shoo' very loudly! This only amused the neighbours and the birds simply sat and watched. So Rob threw a small branch onto the roof in the hope of hitting one of the pair, but apart from a noise when it landed and then a few days later slid off the roof and into the fish pond, that didn't work either!

Plan C!!!

A rubber snake!

We borrowed one from the Scott's. They had used it to keep Pieta off the veranda for a while, but it was now lying in a squiggly heap in the garden. I had the bright idea that this would scare the starlings and keep them off the roof, so we brought it home (minus the head as that had perished over the years) and Rob set to work.

Look carefully..... where the roofs meet. 

He gingerly climbed over the balcony wall onto the veranda roof and flung the snake towards the apex of the roof that meets the main roof! It landed, and slid slowly down and onto the roof he was standing on. (After this garbled sentence I shall understand if you have given up by now.....)

After several tries, it jammed into the join.........and stayed!

See the gap? 

We celebrated, it was perfect, they would be terrified of this green snake and we wondered how many people would walk past and then come to tell us that we had a boomslang on the roof!

We had won the battle!

But not the war!

They are back, using the snake as a handy guide to explain to their friends where they live . 'Oh yes, you know the house with the pretend snake on the roof? That's us.'

So, Plan D.

Tomorrow we have a chap coming to scrunch up chicken wire and force it into any hole that he finds and some he doesn't!

He who laughs last.......