Sometimes Birds Can Hold Their Own Against Starlings

People get frustrated with European Starlings in North America, they are non native and they can snarf up food quickly at the feeders. One of the ways to deal with them is to offer feed mixes that only have hard shell seeds like black oil sunflower seeds or safflower.

Suet can be a challenge though because it’s hard to find a flavor that starlings won’t eat. Some say plain suet keeps starlings away, but I’ve yet to find animal fat that they won’t eat. The above style of suet feeder works well if you get a lot of larger birds like Red-bellied Woodpeckers because the long piece of wood on the bottom gives woodpeckers something to prop their tails on and hold their bodies up. But starlings can easily hang off of it too.

There are feeders that allow a woodpeckers to hang upside down and starlings have a tougher time doing that (though a small percentage seem to figure out it).

But I think that sometimes we forget that our own native species are capable of holding their own against starlings. The above female Red-bellied Woodpecker stared at the starling for a moment and then appeared to have enough…

And then just started yelling at it. At first the starling was oblivious and then kind of jumped as if to say, “Oh, you talking to me?” The woodpecker lunged and the starling flew away. So sometimes, our native birds can fight back with the introduced species.