Absence of starlings kept artillery at bay during winter afternoons

by Alex Burkett

You won't hear the snaps, crackles and pops of sonic warfare on the Vanderbilt campus this year.

That's because the starlings that the twilight clamor was designed to scare away simply aren't around.

Last winter marked the third year personnel from plant operations used noisemakers and recordings of distressed starlings to disperse the animals, which have caused health problems and bothersome noise for community members. But this year the birds are gone -- and so are the cannons and loudspeakers.

"The starlings just did not return this year," said Jon Gullette, associate vice chancellor of plant operations. "Apparently what we've done in the past has been pretty effective. Hopefully that will be the case for years to come."

Mark Petty, director of general services for plant operations, said the tactics that include firecrackers, combustion cannons -- without ammunition -- and recorded sounds of starling distress calls, probably scared the birds away.

"They're very scared of them," Petty said. "Last year was the first time we used [the noisemakers] in three years."

The University first responded to the massive flock of starlings nesting on campus in 1996.

"The first year we did this, there were probably 400,000 to 500,000 birds on campus," Gullette said. "That was the worst. They've numbered fewer and fewer every year since then."

Changes in climate across the United States may have also contributed to keeping the birds at bay this winter, according to Petty and Troy Ettel, an ornithologist with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency. Starlings, which spend the spring and summer months in pairs, fly south in the winter to escape snowy northern climates, said Ettel.

"The weather has been so warm this year that a lot of bird species just haven't flocked up and moved south," Ettel said. "They can become a problem because they tend to flock up in large flocks in winter."

Petty said the proximity of spring and the assurance of warm weather in northern states should keep the starlings away for the rest of the year.

He added that foliage, which should shortly emerge on trees, prevents them from gathering into flocks in the trees.

That's good, because when starlings gather in those large groups -- as they have at Vanderbilt in recent years -- they create "a tremendous amount of noise and problems," Gullette said.

Their droppings, which carry an unpleasant stench, can also lead to health problems.

Dr. John Greene, director of student health, said bird droppings harden and dissolve into airborne particles. Once inhaled, those aresolized particles cause a pulmonary disorder called histoplasmosis.

"It can be as mild as a chronic cough, sometimes a fever," he said. "It's specific to the Ohio Valley and the Cumberland Valley. It takes a fairly high level of exposure to get [histoplasmosis] full-blown, but you can get a mild case just from inhaling the droppings once they've aresolized."

Ettel said starlings, aggressive by nature, also wreak havoc on native bird populations, vying with them for prized nesting nooks, and often driving them from their homes.

The problem, he said, is that nature doesn't control the starling population, which goes largely unchecked because the starling is not indigenous to the United States.

"They have very few natural predators," Ettel said. "There was a guy in New York who wanted all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare's plays to live in the United States. So he brought about 50 or so starlings over and released them in Central Park. That was back in the 1800s."

That's more emphasis than Shakespeare placed on the bird. He wrote in Henry IV that the noisy starling would "speak nothing but 'Mortimer.'" That's the only time the bard mentions the bird.

Ettel said the small flock that arrived in Central Park approximately 110 years ago is not solely responsible for today's abundant population.

"I think it's impossible that just 50 starlings could be the founders of the entire continental population today," he said. "Basic biology shows us that, with inbreeding and genetic depression and all that, that small release couldn't have given us the population we have now. There was some supplemental influx somewhere."

Nonetheless, the fact that starlings have not claimed the campus as their winter home this year has University officials saying they are thankful for the apparent effectiveness of the artillery they used in the past.

Were those tactics some sort of Pavlovian lesson for the winged terrors?