Re: Great Tailed Grackles, Mourning Doves, and Me

On Sat, 10 May 2008 14:12:51 -0700, ctbishop@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 (Charles
Bishop) wrote:

> 
> On Fri, 09 May 2008 17:59:03 -0700, "Reunite Gondwanaland (Mary Shafer)"
> <reunite.gondwana@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> 
> >As I write this there are four grackles picking up bread and a fifth
> >sitting on the edge of the waterfall.  There are a couple on the roof,
> >too.  Dinnertime, I guess.
> 
> Were you in the LA area in the late '60s? Jack Smith wrote of seeing a
> grackle at his home and the Audubon Society said that while he could
have
> seen a Great-tailed grackle, he couldn't have seen a common grackle.
There
> were several columns on the issue.

Oh, yes, I remember the great grackle wars.  Every time I see a
grackle of any sort, I think of Jack.  I loved his column and read it
and his books.  He came up and spoke to the Lancaster Friends of the
Library and I got to meet him and his wife.  She and I have collecting
cookbooks in common.

We definitely have two kinds of grackles here, great-tailed and
Miller's.  My husband the ex-Iowan is familiar with common grackles
and is quite sure we don't have them here.  Not that he would dispute
Jack Smith's identification on Mt Wa****ngton, which is an entirely
different sort of place.

I forgot to mention that we had a pair of mallards in our courtyard
about two weeks ago.  It really startled me to look out and see ducks
right there.  I think they live on the golf course, near the water
hazard that's about 300 ft from our house.  We also have herons and
egrets and Canada geese on the golf course.  The geese are seasonal
and so, I think, are the ducks.

There has been, in previous years, a big problem with Canada geese
over-wintering on the golf courses in the valley here.  They've got
plenty of grass, no predators, and they settle right in.
Unfortunately, they really make a mess, particularly on the greens.
The greens keepers have tried all sorts of things to get rid of them,
from firecrackers onward.  The last I'd heard was that they were using
border collies to herd them off the courses.  I'm sure that greatly
pleased the border collies.

Mary "Born to herd"
-- 
Mary Shafer   Retired aerospace research engineer
We didn't just do weird stuff at Dryden, we wrote re****ts about it.
reunite.gondwana@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 or miliff@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 my blog at http://thedigitalknitter.blogspot.com/