One of the most common birds in North America, starlings often show up and ruin your day. Fortunately, there are easy ways to keep them away from your property without using pesticides or harmful chemicals.
The “how to attract starlings to shoot” is a simple way to attract starlings. Starlings are birds that are attracted to noise and movement, so you can create a lot of noise by shooting guns in your yard.
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Although starlings have attractive plumage, they have long been considered pests — just ask Harry Hotspur.
A starling “being[ing] taught to speak Nothing but ‘Mortimer,’” to a frustrated Henry IV, reminding him of Hotspur and Mortimer’s rebellion against him to “keep his anger still in motion,” as he imagines a starling “being[ing] taught to speak Nothing but ‘Mortimer,’” to a frustrated Henry IV, reminding him of Hotspur and Mortimer’s rebellion against him to “keep his anger still in motion
What is the significance of this? Because in the late 1800s, Eugene Schieffelin, a huge Shakespeare devotee, intended to introduce every bird from Shakespeare’s works to America. As a result of that one line in 1 Henry IV, the only time starlings appear in Shakespeare’s plays, the population of 60 imported starlings has expanded to about 200 million.
If you live in America and have ever seen a starling, you may thank – or blame – Shakespeare and Schieffelin.
You probably don’t enjoy starlings enough to fill a whole continent with them based on a single sentence from a Shakespeare play. Even so, if you want to attract a few starlings to your yard, these starling-friendly methods might help.
1 – Musical Relationships
Shakespeare may have summoned starlings because of their reputation for mimicking and bothering nature, but Mozart had a different perspective on them.
Mozart acquired a starling in April 1784, two months before he would premiere his Piano Concerto No. 17 in G Major to the world. In his notebooks, Mozart describes his attempts to get the starling to sing a section of the third movement back to him, noting both how he produced the song and how the starling sung it.
Mozart’s musical companion was so valued that when it died three years later, he produced a brief comical elegy for it.
What is the takeaway here? While Mozart didn’t capture his starling in the wild, he did discover a method to tap into its mimicking abilities, and you can too.
If you see a starling in your yard, engaging with it in a musical or otherwise sociable manner may not be the worst thing you can do to entice it to stay – particularly if you have some sweets to offer it.
2. Threats are removed
Of course, if your starling visitors are being driven out of the yard by your cat, they won’t want to remain. Even if you don’t have one, starlings are vulnerable to non-lethal methods of scaring birds away, such as imitation owls, snakes, scarecrows, and other similar objects.
They may be handy for keeping other birds at distance, but if you want starlings to come to your house, you’ll need to pull them down first.
3. Install an Appropriate Bird Feeder
You’ll want to set up an incentive for starlings to arrive once you’ve eliminated the reasons for them to stay away from your house. A lot of this will revolve on food, which we’ll discuss in a moment, but first, you must ensure that food is available to the starling.
You could like feeding a starling with your hand, as if you were a Disney Princess. To be honest, starlings often scavenge food from the ground.
However, building a real bird feeder will give you the greatest chance of getting a starling to notice food and staying long enough for you to engage with them, let alone ensuring that they return.
Various bird feeders, on the other hand, are designed to attract different sorts of birds. Because starlings may chase smaller birds away, smaller bird feeders may be too small for them, resulting in fights. As a result, you’ll want to construct a bigger feeder with lots of space for the starlings.
Tubular bird feeders are particularly useful because they enable several starlings to eat at various spots along the cylindrical structure. You may also make a more traditional bird feeder with only one feeding place.
In any case, you’ll want to hang your new bird feeder on a tree limb, over your porch, or another perch several feet above the ground. You could also wish to add a bird bath to the area (or, if you already have one, then you also already have a natural location for your new bird feeder).
Make sure the bird feeder is hidden away from any predators and in a tranquil location wherever you place it. Starlings like to roost with their young, particularly in the winter, and they will not do so if the limbs surrounding them are frequently disturbed.
Finally, since starlings are known for sleeping in late (lucky birds! ), make sure you fill the feeder with enough food so that even if the early birds grab the worm (or, in this instance, bird feed), there’s plenty for the starlings.
4. Select the Correct Food
Finally, you must choose the appropriate food for your starlings. You may think of it as an exercise in reading about how to get rid of starlings and what foods not to throw out lest they arrive, and then doing the exact opposite.
Starlings, for example, like broken corn. If you want to get rid of starlings, don’t leave any lying about – and if you want to attract them, leave enough.
Sunflower kernels are also popular because, like cracked corn, the seeds are frequently already broken open, making life simpler for their short, sharp bills.
Suet and millet are two more popular choices.
Dried mealworms might be an alternative to filling your bird feeder with live wiggling worms if you don’t want to feed your starlings real worms.
Nyjer and safflower seeds, nectar, and, of course, table leftovers are all favorites.
If you follow these methods, you’ll be attracting starlings to your yard like a pied piper, complete with the Magic Flute!
The “standing bird feeder” is a simple way to attract starlings to your yard. Starlings are attracted by the food that you put out for them. If you have a small space, then this is the perfect option for you.
