meek? OK. Last year there was a lovely woodpecker nest in a tree hollow in my yard not 50 feet from the back deck. We watched them feeding their babies hoping to see them finally take flight. The starlings found it. They would come in groups of ten or twenty and harass the woodpeckers literally harrying them dive bombing the nest to get the bird watching the nest to come out and defend. When it did others of the starlings would charge the nest. Eventually they had killed the baby woodpeckers and destroyed the nest and driven the parents away. They ate the baby woodpeckers. This is typical behavior for starlings. Starlings were imported by a deeply deranged man who was infatuated with Shakespeare and just absolutely had to import every bird mentioned in the bard's work to the new continent.

I built the device. It worked marvelously on the starlings, however also excluded the cardinals and larger woodpeckers. So I pulled it off and decided to try something else. The starlings would empty about a quart of expensive feed in the time between sunrise and when We got up. They liked to feed early. So I wrap the thing in foil in the evening and remove it in the morning. It's a tad high maintenance but the Starlings miss breakfast and have moved on to more fruitful opportunities when I uncover it and the regular flighted denizens of my yard and woods come for brunch and make a day of snacking

Thankfully I've seldom had to deal with grackles and starlings, but when they have appeared, chasing them off with a Viking yell and a broom eventually seemed to drive them away permanently, as well as entertaining my neighbors. Of course it probably helped that I never ground feed, had no platform or other feeders they could access, and the vast majority of spilled seed was Nyjer, which they can't eat. So - slim pickin's, combined with crazy broom-wielding lady = starling-grackle-elimination-success! Taking it a step further, when I eliminated all mixes and went to feeding one kind of seed per feeder (sunflower seeds in one, nyjer in the other), many other pests stopped coming by. Apparently millet is much-beloved of several pesky species. Finally, switching to clingers-only feeders eliminated the mob of English house sparrows that had taken over my yard last year, driving off ALL the other birds, including the hummers. This year I may see one or two HOSPs going after spilled seed but they never stay long. The hummers have never returned, though.

Wish I knew. At least those birds are all too big to enter your box. If you're feeding, do research & try not to feed what attracts them. Wish you & blues success! Nicole