Fixed already.

Well, this isn't good. I wonder what it could be.

Bird deaths in Austin, gas leaks in NYC. OMG, I think I see Martians in Van Ness Park!

All kidding aside, I am curious to know the source of both stories. Austin's downtown shops and businesses are reopening at noon according to the article, so that's reassuring.

The bird carcasses were found overnight along Congress Avenue between Sixth and Eighth streets.

Last time I was in that area, there were streams of drunk college kids walking from 6th street to the free parking you can sometimes find up by the capitol. That is to say, I hope everyone in Austin is OK.

The Capitol opened on schedule Monday, the day before the legislative session was to begin.

This leads me to believe it was mass suicide.

Making fun of foreigners, huh?


okay, okay, I know what you mean...

Until now, I'd never heard of a grackle.

Grackles are fairly large black-ish birds, pie (lots of Greater Tailed Grackles in Houston). They make a neat sound that kinda sounds like something electrical going bonkers.

Grackles are actually kinda pretty. Why are they trying to kill them?

Grackles are one of Austin's predominant nuisances. Their sounds are kinda neat, yeah, in small doses. But not if you live near one of the groves of trees in which thousands of them roost every night. The sidewalks under those trees are pretty much white and smelly (much, much worse after a rain).

[They are kind of smart, though. You can regularly see them hop up on to the front bumper of a car in order to pick dead bugs out of the car's grill.]

When I went to UT, campus employed grounds crews to fire shotgun blanks every night at dusk, trying to discourage the grackles from roosting on campus. Sometime during my freshman year, they were forced by public demand to post signs explaining the source and reason for the nightly gunshots; the UT campus is a little, uh, gunshy, thanks to Charles Whitman.

Anyway, I would't be surprised at all to hear that the grackles were deliberately poisoned. In fact, I'll bet a dollar now that that's the case.

Those grackles are like something out of Hitchcock's The Birds. 63 of them isn't even one branch-full.

The first time I ever saw a cluster of about 10 fucking million of them lording over an HEB I just about lost my shit and started running. Yeah, I'm prone to hyperbole, but listen: Every single tree in that parking lot was black with birds. People tried to avoid parking beneath trees. And walking beneath them. Under one tree the gauno was so thick it obscured the profile of a curb. And they probably cleaned it daily or weekly!

I can only assume that the grackle is primarily a bug eater, 'cause I can't really see anything else in Austin that could feed that many birds. For this I salute them, but damn, Austin, that means you're just a bird-flu pandemic and bat-kill away from being buried alive in crawly bugs!

I can only assume that the grackle is primarily a bug eater...

The grackle is the seagull of landlocked Texas -- they eat anything. (And the less work required to obtain it, the better.)

I once saw one in a tree outside my apartment clutching a whole corn tortilla in its beak.

And Austin is pretty much already buried alive in creepy crawly bugs. Don't even get me started on the size of the cockroaches...

(That italicized sentence above was supposed to be small, not slanty. I've worked too hard today.)

Just chiming in to say that I found the grackles to be very charming when I first moved here - sort of like a crow with a high-falutin' tail. However, they've invaded the Med Center here in San Antonio. It's a little creepy to see hundreds of birds, sitting a precise wing-length away from each other all along the top of the lamp posts, not to mention the hundreds that fill the trees. If something disturbs them, they'll swoop down on the cars en masse. Terrifying.

Not only that, but they have this weird behavioral tic when they're feeling territorial. If one grackle gets too close to another grackle's turf -- they're on the ground, mind you -- the one that feels threatened will arch its head back and stare at the sky. Apparently, displaying your throat to another grackle is one way of telling it to fuck off. But I fall for it every time, thinking there's something interesting going on overhead.

Third or fourth time that happened is when my hatred for them began in earnest.

Birds, you say? Birds with a fake-out move?

Here are the Grackles I'm familiar with (I misspelled the name above).

And uh, yeah, Texas needs its Grackles. Even with Grackles, and other bug eating birds, the bugs are horrendous. I'll never forget the first tree roach I saw - it was at least the size of a Volkswagen. And love-bugs. Oh, god, the love-bugs. Bajillions of the helicopter-ish bugs mating in mid-air. You couldn't breathe without inhaling some of them.

Oh, great. Now I'm going to have nightmares and it's all my own damn fault.

I like Grackles, but I'm certainly glad we don't have them in the mass amounts Texas does. They're beautifully irridescent, and have a way of puffing themselves up in some sort of display that's fun to watch. We have the Common Grackle here in Jersey.