Watching, a photo by Tygh on Flickr.
Once upon a time, I hated starlings. These birds are really aggressive and ferocious. They eat everything in their destructive paths, evict other cavity nesters and make life generally difficult for native species.
A starling will devour a cake of suet in about the same amount of time it takes to put a new one out. The rudeness of these creatures is just appalling. …and there is never just a single starling. In my early days of birding, I was at a loss for how to control our local population of these demons.
Somehow during all this, it dawned on me that the existence of a pellet gun, along with the skill to use it could potentially address the problem. I had been an expert marksman in the military and I was confident that I had the technical ability. On the other hand, I was also a vegetarian who was appalled by what I felt was unnecessary cruelty at the center of the way we produce food.
In retrospect, it was a ridiculous notion. Making a dent in the population would have required a pile of starling bodies that would have made Buffalo Bill blush. I’m going to skip to the end of this story and tell you that I made no such pile of carcasses, but I didn’t take the high road either.
There was a single starling casualty at my hands. It was supposed to be clean and simple… a single shot and one demon less. I don’t want to go into the details of what happened, but I am compelled to write that the ferocity these birds show at the feeder is a reflection of the way they cling to their lives. An animal that will fight a dozen other birds for a scrap of food is not going to just die quietly.
Underestimating that animal’s tenacity was a hard lesson for me. I gained a respect for the individual, and the species that will always be a part of me. I still don’t like wasting bird food on them, but once in a while I allow myself to stare back at a starling and I am haunted by the knowledge of its fierce heart beating within.