Recalcitrant Green Muskrat Dual Exhaust: Have Destroy!

Every year around this time, as I'm lying in bed in the dark of the night listening to them march around up in the attic I am moved once again to hold forth on the utter lackwittedness of starlings.

What the fuck are they doing up there? Are they looking for Amelia Earhart? And why, at two o' mother-butt-huffing A of the M!!?? Go to bed already! You are not owls; you are not smart enough to be owls. It's night, ya little bastards!!!

I blame the parents. Actually I should blame myself but I know better than to live in an attic; I live downstairs where the electrical outlets are. Theoretically I could block the entry hole. But it would help if the space provided were shaped more like a fat broad and not a series of diminishing triangles, bristling with rusted nails and coated with dehydrated ass.

Normally I am tenderhearted when it comes to Gods lil' critters, but I have no sympathy for these things. Starlings are like runaway robots...originally programmed to perform a few basic tasks: eat, crap, and scream- but they've run out of the range of the remote or something and they just continue to mindlessly perform these activities like overwound toys until they get flattened by a car. They'll pick in the grass (for what; worms? seeds? Viagra?) and just automatically continue on, reach the cement driveway, continue picking all the way across the cement, run into the edge of the cement, fall off, continue picking, stand up, pick pick pick, on into the tall grass.....closer and closer to where the neighbors cat has been openly sitting in utter bemusement all this time as lunch wanders right up to it's paws. This is the only animal stupid enough to just stand in the middle of the sidewalk and be run over by A BABY STROLLER, yo.

Even a baby chicken has the sense to stay close to the nest. Nature has told it that it is a young and inexperienced birdie, and it listens. Not the starling. As soon as it finds it's sea legs it's careening off in all directions, tripping over itself, falling off branches, forgetting to flap it's wings in mid-flight and falling out of the air, wandering into my garage, trying to eat cigarette butts, and falling asleep in the middle of the street.

This probably explains why at 2 a.m. they're roaming around my attic. That and the fact that the nest up there is the size of a bale of hay all spread out, and growing. With one single, small bird-butt-sized cup in the middle of it! There's a whole lot of real estate up there covered with dried hay and chicken feathers and what seems to be coyote crap full of hair, so it all probably looks kind of nest-ish...particularly to something with no more brain than, say, a toe. So you gotta figure day; night; it's all the same. If only they'd grab a goddamn clue, though! It's night! It's an attic! No comic books! Nothing to eat!

Nothing but other baby starlings from years past, that is. Oh goodness gracious yes, Mathilda. Having spent the night pinballing around the rafters instead of sleeping like normal birds, they finally wind down, get tired, fall asleep wherever they happen to be...and then the sun rises, the day heats up and a couple hours later you have slow-baked Tiny Chicken In The Rough. When I find them, they're perfect skeletal vignettes, tucked in a little ball, head under a wing, surrounded by pinfeathers and their own crapped-out remains. (Which is the fate I would have met had I remained in contact with my family of origin but that's another post. ahem.) My home... a warm and inviting place to raise a family situated picturesquely below a hideous graveyard of avian cannibalism.

The first brood of baby starlings has finally died. This year they wound up in my porch roof, right over the front door, which has perfumed the air with the welcoming aroma of putrefying baby bird.

Nothing daunted, Dad starling is out front on the phone line, screaming, twirling his wings and crapping on pedestrians trying to attract another mate. Just like that old saying 'If at first you don't succeed, completely fail to notice.'
Kinda like the Bush Administration.