Were do birds live at night?

[Chrisf1961]

Got really into the bird watching recently in our garden and purchased a pair of ok binoculars from Lidl yesterday ..they do the job...but it got me wondering were do all the birds at night go ? Especially the starlings as there seems to be 100s of them.

[billmoseley]

most have a favourite roosting spot and starlings group together and roost in their 1000s

[Chrisf1961]

Thanks Bill i thought they maybe lived in eaves of houses etc

[orkneycadian]

most have a favourite roosting spot and starlings group together and roost in their 1000s

Usually inside farm buildings, crapping all over the place....

Time to get them on the general licence for Scotland!

And for the current temporary ban on the shooting of wildfowl not to include greylag geese! Theres gazillions of them here at the moment!

[Kenn]

Not a good sentiment orkneycadian, with the current harsh weather the geese will need all the help they can get.
Are you sure you have zillions, have seen reports of large numbers but nothing on that scale and across the water in Caithness their numbers are way down on last winter.

[orkneycadian]

OK, make a slight exagerration (depending what a zillion actually is!), but I think the official number at the moment is 85,000, which is more than 4 geese for every human.

Thge farmers are in utter despair, as they are strippping the fields and killing all the grass. Whats not helping is....

• Temporary bans on shooting
• The current moratorium on the issue of new shotgun and firearms certificates, in the wake of folk down south going loopy with them
• The current weather, meaning there is even less grass for sheep, lots of which are in lamb.

Accordingly, farmers over here are having to resort to rockets to try and scare them off the land, or sending for Italian tourists to shoot them! (getting a shotgun certificate is obviously a lot easier in Italy than it is in the UK!)

[Kenn]

Is there not a compensation for the farmers who's fields they graze?
Down south where the geese over winter in great numbers there is such a system as they tend to decimate the winter wheat fields and whilst appreciating that winter wheat is not sown up here, surely with Orkney being such a birding place and attracting so many tourists as a result the authorities and The RSPB could get their heads together if the problem is a large as you state.

[orkneycadian]

Believe me, if there was anyway to make money in having the heart ripped out of your land, then farmers would be onto it!

But there isn't so the best you can do is try and get rid of the blighters.

On the bright side, the Italian shooting tourists we get in the winter are doing wonders to help extend the normally very short summer tourist season. Some of the hotels now close in the winter, as its too expensive to stay open for not a lot of visitors. With Italians coming at this time of year (temporary bans aside), the geese probably do a lot more for tourism being shot than they do wandering around the fields decimating them!