Aww, poor little starlings. I love them and their cheeky ways. I like the way they go around in little gangs looking like they casually have their "hands in thier pockets".
House sparrows are a major pest, especially at the zoo. Their nesting habits are the worst, and they occur in plague numbers, fouling and devouring animal food. They do outcompete native birds in man-made environments too.
Did you have a difficult time not thinking grumpy thoughts about all their native "pests"? I constantly had to catch myself and force appreciation for English ivy, sparrows, starlings, and pigeons. It's startling when it's turned back on me though. My South African friend hates my lovely native lantana flowers. Invasive weeds there.
I boggled a bit over some things--solitary shoots of purple loosestrife, for example. I went on an invasive species walk (SPOILER ALERT FOR A POST I HOPE I WRITE LATER THIS WEEK BUT DON'T COUNT ON IT) and discovered that they were mostly managing native invasive species, to keep them from re-wilding the island in the wake of a decline in cattle and sheep grazing effects.
I described the approach I took at Mass Audubon, "if it ain't from New England rip it out" and was met with stunned looks.
Central Texas seems overly focused on native invasive management. For sure, we have a problem with non-native invasives such as salt cedar, but it doesn't get nearly as much attention as native Ashe junipers, partly due to a confusion in the difference between the terms non-native and invasive. Not helped by the confusing common name of "cedar" for the junipers, that's for sure. Ashe juniper is native, but it's a colonizer of disturbed land - which there is a lot of it due to a history of very bad land management, so it spreads quite easily. Normally, juniper would just be living in areas on a slope greater than about 3%, an important ecological role in preventing erosion. However, there is an idea that these BAD juniper "steal" water from the aquifer, therefore, they all need to be chopped down in light of our recharge problems. This policy is defended because they are dismissed as being "invasive" which people think is synonymous with non-native. In fact, not only do juniper prevent erosion, but their root zones are thought to prevent the spread of oak wilt, by acting as a barrier around live oak roots. Not to mention, juniper provide habitat for endangered song birds.
Hmm. Can't find a reference for the exact slope that juniper are thought to be originally restricted to. I once attended a lecture on Ashe juniper, but I no longer have my notes. 3% doesn't seem all that much, but that's the number in my head. Bah. Annoying.
Poor things :-( England must have changed a lot. On the other hand, that's intriguing about their having been rare until the early 19th century, and makes me wonder about the agricultural balance then. I suppose the Industrial Revolution had led to regrowth of woodlands on former pasturage, and that the continuation of coppicing added to this, whereas coppicing almost died out in WW2 ... And I wonder whether the loss of all the "wasteland" I remember from the 1960s, some of which was WW2 bombsites, is a factor. Not quite interested enough to wade through all the footnotes in that link, but sad about the starlings. And the sparrows.
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Only joking. I'm sure they displace some perfectly good American animal or you wouldn't be anti-them.
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They earned a *ahem* special place in my heart as a wildlife intern after the first hundred or so.
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I described the approach I took at Mass Audubon, "if it ain't from New England rip it out" and was met with stunned looks.
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