At the Arizona State University Downtown Phoenix campus, between the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and the University Center, you can hear the jungle every night.
For the last two years at ASU, I have left the Cronkite school building at all hours of the day, sometimes catching the birds at the height of their noise, too loud to even speak over. I’ve always wondered what kind of species creates such a noise and why their roosts have targeted these specific trees.
I’ve finally found the answer.
The culprit (among other birds like starlings and finches) are scrappy blackbirds called great-tailed grackles, a slender, yellow-eyed species that live in large, noisy roosts. At ASU Downtown, they’ve chosen the trees right outside the University Center to flock to every night. Every time the light rail passes, their cacophony increases to a fever pitch.
“The birds come in about 7 o’clock at night, and at sunrise they leave,” Marvin Fisher, an electrician at the ASU Downtown campus, said. He said janitorial staff spend over an hour each morning cleaning up the previous night’s bird droppings.
That’s not surprising. A downtown blogger and entrepreneur named Connor Rickett has described the great-tailed grackle as being able to “produce poop like it was their primary design function.” And “to add insult to injury, their tails aren’t even that great.”
At the time of the interview, Fisher had recently undergone ear surgery and had heard the birds at full-volume for the first time earlier that morning.
“It was like a jungle,” he said. “It was just amazing.”
Daniel Peterson, an assistant professor of exercise science at ASU, teaches in one of the classrooms on the second floor of the University Center. His evening classes can hear the birds through the windows, although he says it doesn’t impede his teaching.
He also knows the birds on a more intimate level: he’s been the target of their aerial missiles.
“Not great,” he said, describing the encounter. “It was a pretty standard ‘got pooped on story.’”
He described getting it out of his hair using the ‘scoop and shake’ method, but nevertheless seemed to hold no ill will against the birds.
Tommy DeBardeleben, a bird expert, also wrote about the species, describing them as “a nuisance.”
“This bird is found in high numbers in Maricopa County, especially in midst of the city, parks, parking lots and gas stations,” DeBardeleben wrote over email. “It is very vocal and has a highly omnivorous diet.”
The birds have also been troublesome in downtown Tempe, according to the Phoenix New Times, costing cleaning crews $75,000 in just one fiscal year. Community organizations have tried thinning the ficus trees they roost in, utilizing ultraviolet reflectors that stress the birds, lasers (not strong enough to blind or hurt the birds) pointed into the trees, and playing recordings of distressed birds. None have been effective.
Except propane cannons.
The weapons blast sound and heat at the birds at short intervals and have been able to deter the birds for up to a week at a time. But the measure is even noisier than the birds themselves and often disturb every species in the area, including humans.
The location of the birds’ roost makes sense as well. According to New Times article, roosting in large numbers and near streetlights make the birds “more likely to see approaching predators and less likely to be eaten by larger birds.”
According to Fisher, some downtown maintenance staff have discussed thinning the affected trees or even cutting them down. But their shade is valuable and the trees are old enough that the idea is not being seriously considered.
Unfortunately, besides looking at their natural behavior and survival techniques, I still can’t definitively pin down why the birds picked those two trees rather than the ones at Civic Space Park or the less-mature trees near Taylor Place.
I’ve found you can only ask very specific and insistent questions about two trees for a few days before your coworkers begin to think there’s something seriously wrong with you.
But for now, it’s still nice to hear a little piece of the wild in the middle of our concrete jungle.
Reporter Connor Van Ligten contributed to this article.
Contact the reporter at Rebecca.Spiess@asu.edu.
