How Not to Hunt Starlings

I arrived at the Powhatan Wildlife Management Area at around noon last Saturday to hunt starlings. In my company was Bob, my father in law; Tanya, a vegan anthopology student who is finding out what's wrong with us studying us; and Paul Fritz, a gun-tinkering blacksmith who usually serves as our range safety officer for my deer hunting classes. We unloaded the shotguns and packs and waited for the rest of our group.

Scott, a former student of ours (and the first alumnus to get a deer), pulled into the parking lot and walked over to greet the rest of our hunting party. As he approached, we noticed that he had a 9mm handgun on his hip.

Paul cocked his head and spoke. "That 9mm is a little light for starlings, don't you think? What if they all rush you at once?"

"Always remember to save the last round for yourself," I added.

Somehow that pistol ended up back in Scott's car before the hunt began.

I am on a quest to establish the hunting of invasive European starlings as a practice as common as dove hunting in America. In the interest of doing this, I need to bag a bunch of starlings and come up with palatable recipes for them.

My rationale in hunting the Powhatan WMA was that last season's dove fields might still have enough grain on the ground, hidden under the snow since mid-December, that large flocks of starlings would be attracted to the site. What I was looking for were the mega-flocks of thousands of birds that snake across the sky like a biblical plague.

I wanted as many hunters as possible, my logic being that there would be long periods of nothing in the sky followed by the sudden appearances of these massive flocks in a situation where we'd need to put as much shot in the air as possible for a minute or two before they were gone.

The good news is that I was indeed half right. There were in fact the long periods of nothing happening, precisely as I'd predicted. The bad news is that these long periods of nothing happening were punctuated more by a growing sense of hopelessness and failure than by gigantic flocks of starlings per se.

We saw bluebirds, turkey vultures, ducks, sparrows and a lone turkey. Precious few starlings. Still, it was a nice day a-field and I suppose that from an anthropological perspective Tanya got just as much out of it as she would have if we'd have bagged 100 birds. The only actual starling was spotted by the keen eye of Scott, who missed it since he was still new to shotgunning. In retrospect, he'd probably have hit the thing if he'd used the 9mm.

Naturally as we drove off we saw a huge flock of between 3 and 5 thousand birds snake their way directly over our car.

Starlings are everywhere around my office in downtown Charlottesville but shooting at them is frowned upon. In an urban setting I think that traps of some sort could work well and Paul and I intend to do some experiments in that direction. The pursuit of the large swarms of starlings with shotguns is still worthwhile, I think. Better locations for future hunts will probably be agricultural land. Dairy farms where large amounts of feed are spread out in the open on a daily basis for the cows will also tend to attract huge flocks and the farm owners will probably appreciate some help in being rid of them.

I had hoped to be cooking starling meat every night for the rest of this week and obviously this has been a bit of a set-back. Meanwhile, if anyone reading this in central Virginia has a large tract of land with a constant starling problem then I would love to hear from you.

[Photo used courtesy of Midlander1231 under Creative Commons license]