Here's the scoop on our starling invasion...
Starlings thrive despite a chilly reception
INVASIVE SPECIES: Bird is a pest in Lower 48; state hopes to slow its spread here.
adn.com
By GEORGE BRYSON
Anchorage Daily News
Published: January 2, 2006
Last Modified: January 2, 2006 at 01:38 AM
As far as invasive-species abatement campaigns go, the new effort to stop the spread of European starlings in Anchorage is still fairly modest. The state has one person on the job.
That would be Department of Fish and Game area biologist Rick Sinnott, who's also responsible for managing all of the wild bears and moose in town (as well as all the people who interact with wild bears and moose).
To do the starling job, however, Sinnott has just one bird trap, a wire-mesh box loaned to him by a local member of the National Audubon Society, a conservation group that considers starlings to be a highly prolific, non-native avian pest, at least in North America.
In the opposite corner is a growing population of starlings, whose numbers here quadrupled over the past year (from 35 to 155) in the annual Anchorage Christmas Bird Count.
That's nothing at all like the hundreds of thousands of starlings that clog major cities outside Alaska, pushing out native birds and generally creating a screeching, unsightly mess. But it's a start.
Seattle is probably a good example of how bad a starling infestation can become, Sinnott says.
"You can have hundreds of thousands of them in a park or a forest," he said, "and the limbs are all kind of dripping with bird poop and stuff like that."
They don't sing that well either. North American bird expert David Allen Sibley describes the song of an individual starling as "a harsh rattling with some high, thin, slurred whistles" and a group of starlings as "a mushy, gurgling, hissing chatter with high, sliding whistles."
Multiply that by an estimated 200 million starlings, and you begin to get a sense of a continentwide infestation that's only growing worse.
According to ornithologists, all of the European starlings in North America appear to be descendents of 100 original starlings that were deliberately introduced into New York City's Central Park in the early 1890s by a society dedicated to bringing to America every kind of bird mentioned in the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare.
The starlings' numbers here quickly spread as they took advantage of America's more rural landscape, moving into the pre-existing homes of native North American cavity-dwellers like woodpeckers and bluebirds, and expanding their range throughout the Lower 48 states and southern Canada.
For nearly a century, Alaska's colder climate kept them at bay. But recently warmer winters and the pressure of millions of starlings to the south have apparently encouraged some flocks to drift farther north. Starlings were first spotted in Christmas bird counts in Fairbanks, Palmer and Anchorage in 1979.
In Anchorage, their numbers in Christmas bird counts remained in the single digits until recently. Forty-two were counted in 2003 and 35 in 2004. This year, however, Christmas count participants in Anchorage spotted 155 starlings, which raised the alarm.
"We're definitely concerned," Sinnott said, "because they do throw out a lot of the native cavity-nesters, especially the secondary ones, like chickadees and things like that can't make their own nests ... and we do expect them to increase."
Starlings prosper in agricultural settings, like the Matanuska-Susitna Borough. Their numbers around Palmer, in recent bird counts, have exceeded their numbers in Anchorage. Which might be a good sign, according to Alaska Audubon director Stan Senner, since there isn't much farming in Alaska.
"I don't see Alaska ever having millions of starlings like there are in some places in the Lower 48, because we don't have the huge agricultural landscape," Senner said. "And I do think the winters are generally too harsh for them.
"But that doesn't mean we might not have a lot of starlings around," he added.
Especially if the winters continue to turn warmer.
Once they're entrenched in an area, Sinnott says, starlings also manage to adapt well to town life.
"They eat crumbs, and the same kinds of food that ravens and magpies eat -- hamburger buns and french fries and things people drop on the sidewalk. So in some ways, they'll replace at least some of our local scavenger birds."
Alaskans are permitted to shoot starlings. The 2005-2006 edition of the state's hunting regulations list them as "deleterious exotic wildlife" -- along with Norway rats, pigeons and domestic rabbits gone wild.
Residents of Anchorage can shoot them too, as long as they don't discharge their firearms from or across a public road, or on private property without the permission of the property owner.
But a possibly safer and more efficient way of controlling pest species is to capture them in larger numbers in traps, Sinnott says. And that's what he hopes to do -- with a little help.
"We need calls from the public," he said, "because we need to get fresh information as it's happening on where these flocks are. Unfortunately, most people wouldn't know a starling if it bit them. So that's a problem."
They're small, mostly black birds, sometimes with white speckles, and they often have a yellow bill, especially during the breeding season.
"They almost always are in flocks," Sinnott said. "And they tend to have kind of a high-pitched squealing song for a call. It's very distinctive."
After he catches the starlings, he'll euthanize them, he says. Which might help control their numbers.
"We can maybe blunt the increase," Sinnott said. "But I doubt we'll ever be able to stop them at this point ... now that they've reached a level of several hundred."
Daily News reporter George Bryson can be reached at gbryson@adn.com. |
