My husband made a raised table for me. It's about three feet high (a 4 x 4 post) and the table top is about 2 x 3. My crows get dried dog food every morning and if I have meat scraps for dinner they get those late in the day. They like fish scraps, chicken hearts, peanuts, cooked spaghetti (sans the sauce), leftover fruit .. just about any scraps I have they enjoy. Be careful with chips and crackers as I have read that salt is very bad for birds ... can't place the article right now, but google it maybe. When I go out to fill my tray feeders with black oil sunflower seeds for the birds and squirrels I call for the crows and they show up and start making a lot of noise. I know many people dislike them, but they are so fascinating to watch and really are beautiful birds. I love my crows. This year I have a pair nesting in my back yard and I can watch them from inside my living room and not disturb them. They are very sweet together and make all sorts of lovely little noises to each other. I enjoy having them in my yard. The funniest thing I've seen them doing lately is following squirrels around and digging up the peanut they just buried. The squirrels are clueless. lol They had me laughing out loud watching them last week. I kept giving the squirrels peanuts just to keep the game going. Cheap entertainment for me. :)

Lucky for me starlings are only an occasional problem in my yard. Hordes fly in, stay a week or so and vanish. When they come I use a recycled recycled plastic upside-down feeder like this: (from Suet Bird Feeders) I am loving the recycled plastic over wood, it's so easy to clean and you can even use bleach against mold. Don't think I haven't done a load of bird feeders in my dishwasher. BUT it's not perfectly starling proof - one starling will always figure it out. As an alternative I have a ground table feeder for starlings like this one: from Ground Table Bird Feeders. I use super cheap chicken feed cracked corn (was about $6 for a 50lb bag) and a super cheap millet/milo seed blend ($6 a 25lb bah) that I buy at a local feed store. The ground feeder is a lot easier for the starlings to use, plus they seem to prefer the corn food, so it at least keeps them busy and out of my other bird feeders to a great extent. They don't go through my pricey seed as fast. I've found offering starlings and grackle sort of birds alternative food works pretty well since they are going to be there no matter what I do. Jays also like the ground table.

Great pictures, at certain times of the year, Grackle shows up in large numbers around my feeder. They dominate the feeder except for the red belly woodpecker. Fortunately, they don't stick around forever, so I don't get just grackles. Sometimes they show up in groups and they all look up in the sky at the same time (like your last picture), which I thought was weird, but it turns out that is a dominating gesture. Basically, they're all thumping their chest at each other. They all have very beautiful sheen feathers ranging from shiny black to a greenish color. When I visited my sister in California, I notice they have what looks like a smaller version of the Grackle (I think they are Brewer's black bird). But she also gets Ravens, which I have seen only once in my area (probably passing through). I was shocked to see a crow like bird size of a duck. Paul

I love birds and cats, not a good combo. I keep my cat inside, but there is a stray I'm feeding when I see her, thinking of taking her in. There were two dead sparrows by where I put the cat food for the crows and some kind of woodpecker. Now the kitty has scared a lot of the birds away, I fear, and is perhaps killing the little ones, I'm more than happy to put out plenty of food for them all. That is the one thing I don't like about cats. They kill for sport even if they don't need the food because it's their nature. This morning, I threw the peanuts out as usual, the bluejay was waiting, and while I was standing looking at the flowers in front to see if anything new was blooming, the bluejay came right down about 10 feet from me and grabbed for a peanut (they have to compete with the squirrels). Murder? I saw two dead crows in the gutter down the street in 2003 and photographed them because I suspected West Nile. I think disease is taking its toll of all the birds in my area. One day a couple years ago there was a very sick or injured crow who had made it to my front porch and had found the fresh water I put out every day, winter or summer, rain or shine. I felt sorry for it. It made it to the base of the neighbor's tree and when I approached it, flew off very low. I do worry about West Nile and put on surgical gloves to pick up the dead things. Oh those dead crows. I called the county and they weren't interested because they said they had already confirmed West Nile in our county. Those birds were in the gutter for at least a month, it was not in front of my property, nobody disposed of them. Yeah, like I need to put on my surgical gloves and go several houses down, pick up the dead crows and double bag them in grocery bags and put them in my garbage. I wondered if I ought to do that. Maybe you are supposed to call animal control to come collect them, I don't know.