The Bird Plague

Radford, Va. (pop. 11,596), might have qualified as the noisiest place in America last week. Blank-loaded shotguns roared, a carbide cannon thundered, and a mobile loudspeaker shrilled the panicky distress cry of the starling. The point was to scare a flock of some 150,000 stubborn starlings out of town. It was a measure born of desperation--a sort of real-life reply to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.

The starlings had found Radford a most enticing spot. They could feast on the grain that local farmers set out to feed their cattle, and they discovered an especially thick two-acre bosque of warm pines in the center of town, which was an ideal roosting place. The townsfolk, bird lovers all, did not find the situation all that ideal. Radford's starlings 1) raised an ear-splitting racket, 2) produced so many droppings that the whole town, said a resident, smelled "like a wet chicken coop," and 3) crowded out indigenous birds like cardinals, robins and martins. Since the starlings were plainly not going to migrate from Radford of their own accord, the townsfolk and various wildlife experts hatched a counterplot.

One chilly night two weeks ago, they sprayed the roosting starlings with a mixture of water and an industrial detergent that would prevent them from fluffing their feathers to warm themselves. By all rights, the starlings should have soon thudded by the thousands to the ground, dead from exposure. But the weather suddenly turned warm, and only 2,000 birds fell. Cost of the scheme: $2 per corpse.

When fiendishness failed, the town turned to noise. Last week's salvos drove all but a few of the birds from Radford--presumably to quieter roosts nearby. The citizens will next thin out the piney grove in hopes of discouraging the birds from returning.

Immense flocks of fast-breeding starlings, a bird originally native to Europe, are plaguing other communities. "We've gotten calls from at least eight other localities that want to break up roosts," says Don Gnegy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In Richmond, Va., there are about 275,-000 starlings concentrated in wooded areas on the west side of the city.

An even worse infestation of birds bedevils Scotland Neck, N.C. (pop. 2,869). There, perhaps 20 million blackbirds are jammed into 60 to 85 acres of pine and hardwood trees. Branches have broken under the weight of the birds, and the accumulated carpet of guano in some sections of the woods is a foot thick. No one can figure out why the birds chose this particular town or how to drive the intruders away. One man wrote the mayor with a gruesome plan for overkill: "You mix coarse meal with plaster of paris and feed it to the birds. It's sure to stop 'em up." But nothing has worked--not even a Radford-like barrage of noise--perhaps because the infested area is so much bigger. As yet, there seems to be no "final solution."

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