newwave1965 (August 6, 2008 at 1:26 am)

How sad the martins were in a death grip. Starling resistant units are now becoming more common across the countryshould you see a colony with round holes drop a hit about this video.

MondoMedia7 (July 1, 2008 at 4:13 am)

if you are VERY patient, you can shoot a lot of them because purple martins never land to eat, so if you put some sweet corn or other types of grain in a pile on the ground below the house, you can shoot & kill many sparrows and starlings. we have done it a lot in the past.

pwnage0013 (June 30, 2008 at 8:14 am)

NOW I can see how I was correct in shooting all the starlings and sparrows that tried to invade our purple martin houses! I never realized what a menace they are to the purple martin young.

dove559 (June 7, 2008 at 4:17 am)

thanks! i do live in the US. the only thing i hate doing in the end is picking up all the dead starlings. i do realize there seems to be a lot more different variety of birds in my back yard now. now that there arent that many starlings...: )

sgillbee (June 4, 2008 at 6:27 pm)

We live inside city limits so firearms are verboten. So we use a standard WalMart-issue air-rifle (BB gun). It works well for sparrows... not so well for starlings. Trapping works well for both. The nice thing about trapping is that it is unattended... you don't have to be watching.All that said, these days we haven't had many problems with starlings are converting all our housing to starling-resistant entrances (SREHs). Now we just deal with sparrows and both ways work well for them.

bukaroo12 (June 4, 2008 at 6:19 pm)

You that say you shoot/trap starlings. How effective is the trapping vs shooting? How many birds are you able to eradicate?

bukaroo12 (June 4, 2008 at 6:11 pm)

If you're in the US keep shooting! Nice job! I wish I could take out 2000 of these invasive birds. Our native birds will thank you!

Seif5034 (June 2, 2008 at 7:44 pm)

just killed my first starling today. =)

dove559 (May 22, 2008 at 4:09 am)

last year i shot over 2 thousand starlings with my pcp...but this year i shot just over a hundred of these starlings... so i realized i should stop...nowadays if im lucky i will see just one... : (

bisonwerks (April 20, 2008 at 2:07 pm)

We have had these horrid-non-native pests devastate nestfulls of Martin eggs and seen the results of them pecking baby Martins to death. Extermination is the best way to deal with them, or else as this documents, they threaten the Martin population.