Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard Read Free Book Online

they return winter after winter; apparently southwest Virginia is their idea of Miami Beach. In Waynesboro, where the starlings roost in the woods near the Coyner Springs area, residents can’t go outside for any length of time, or even just to hang laundry, because of the stink—“will knock you over”—the droppings, and the lice.
    Starlings are notoriously difficult to “control.” The story is told of a man who was bothered by starlings roosting in a large sycamore near his house. He said he tried everything to get rid of them and finally took a shotgun to three of them and killed them. When asked if that discouraged the birds, he reflected a minute, leaned forward, and said confidentially, “Those three it did.”
    Radford, Virginia, had a little stink of its own a few years ago. Radford had starlings the way a horse has flies, and in similarly unapproachable spots. Wildlife biologists estimated the Radford figure at one hundred fifty thousand starlings. The people complained of the noise, the stench, the inevitable whitewash effect, and the possibility of an epidemic of an exotic, dust-borne virus disease. Finally, in January, 1972, various officials and biologists got together and decided that something needed to be done. After studying the feasibility of various methods, they decided to kill the starlings with foam. The idea was to shoot a special detergent foam through hoses at the roosting starlings on a night when weathermen predicted a sudden drop in temperature. The foam would penetrate the birds’ waterproof feathers and soak their skins. Then when the temperature dropped, the birds would drop too, having quietly died of exposure.
    Meanwhile, before anything actually happened, the papers were having a field day. Every crazy up and down every mountain had his shrill say. The local bird societies screamed for blood—thestarlings’ blood. Starlings, after all, compete with native birds for food and nesting sites. Other people challenged the mayor of Radford, the Virginia Tech Wildlife Bureau, the newspaper’s editors and all its readers in Radford and everywhere else, to tell how THEY would like to freeze to death inside a bunch of bubbles.
    The Wildlife Bureau went ahead with its plan. The needed equipment was expensive, and no one was quite sure if it would work. Sure enough, on the night they sprayed the roosts the temperature didn’t drop far enough. Out of the hundred and fifty thousand starlings they hoped to exterminate, they got only three thousand. Somebody figured out that the whole show had cost citizens two dollars per dead starling.
    That is, in effect, the story of the Radford starlings. The people didn’t give up at once, however. They mulled and fussed, giving the starlings a brief reprieve, and then came up with a new plan. Soon, one day when the birds returned at sunset to their roost, the wildlife managers were ready for them. They fired shotguns loaded with multiple, high-powered explosives into the air. BANG , went the guns; the birds settled down to sleep. The experts went back to their desks and fretted and fumed some more. At last they brought out the ultimate weapon: recordings of starling distress calls. Failure. YIKE OUCH HELP went the recordings; snore went the birds. That, in toto , is the story of the Radford starlings. They still thrive.
    Our valley starlings thrive, too. They plod morosely around the grass under the feeder. Other people apparently go to great lengths to avoid feeding them. Starlings are early to bed and late to rise, so people sneak out with grain and suet before dawn, for early rising birds, and whisk it away at the first whiff of a starling; after sunset, when the starlings are safely to roost bothering somebody else, they spread out the suet and grain once again. I don’t care what eats the stuff.
     
    It is winter proper; the cold weather, such as it is, has come to stay. I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out.