Grackle update

The huge number of Common Grackles and Starlings[more than a thousand] that have been spending the night in the ten pear trees surrounding the Pulitzer Fountain [pictured above] are still streaming into their night roost trees every evening. As sunset gets earlier so too does the birds' arrival time. Nowadays they begin arriving a little after 5 pm, with peak numbers at about 5:40. The trees are beginning to lose leaves. The flock will move on sometime soon, to spend the winter in gigantic evergreen roosts in the south --- roosts that may include 50,000 birds. Every day now I'm prepared to come and find them gone. And every day, as they start flying in I breathe a little sigh of relief: reprieve...for one more day.