[filoeleven]

I’d love to have an overenginnered (or not!) solution for the starlings in my neighborhood. Their horrible screechy calls drive me mad. But the fact that it’s sound and not poop that’s the motivation probably makes it a more difficult problem to solve, since it relies on both sound (to find where the demonspawn is) and vision (to not hit some random screechy kid).

Starlings can sing melodic songs too, and I don’t mind those, but what I hear most often are their screeches. They are literally doing it right now outside my window. I wonder if it’s a territorial ”song” that I’m hearing more often than Europeans do since they’re an invasive species in the US, or if this particular call is a learned behavior from the population in my city.

The only theoretical solution that I’ve come up with so far is something that listens for the offending sound pattern, verifies that it’s also a “small dark bird” via camera, and then chases it off a water gun or laser or pocket nuke or stern words or whatever. All of that tech is beyond me, but I’ve definitely fantasized about it ever since they showed up here a few years back.