Science: Bird Scotcher

They blasted the trees with birdshot. They used firehoses, thumped on dishpans and shot skyrockets. They tried a sound truck blaring terrifying shrieks. They rolled in big searchlights and dazzled the air. But in suburban Mount Vernon, N.Y., there was no getting rid of the starlings. By the thousands, the birds went on chattering loud enough to shout down whole neighborhoods of people, fouling the pavement below the shade trees.

Then last week a stranger came to town, Otto D. Standke by name, 5 ft. 7 in. tall, 71 years old, with hokum in his manner and magic in his bones. Starlings? There’s a way to get rid of them. Step a little closer and we’ll talk terms. Mount Vernon stepped a little closer, saw the shimmering words on the stranger’s golden tie pin. He was, by self-proclamation, THE BIRD MAN.

Ripe for Laughs. In a red plaid sports cap and corduroy trousers full of holes, the bird man was soon out on Commonwealth Avenue collecting crowds in skeptic ranks. In his hands he carried what looked like two thin aluminum cricket bats. Around his neck was a lanyard from which dangled a long aluminum tube. The trees were ripe with starlings; Mount Vernon was ripe for a laugh.

Walking fast, the bird man moved through the neighborhood, in and out of driveways and over lawns, flapping the aluminum cricket bats together, not looking where he was going, but staring piercingly into the trees. The starlings stared back. The bird man kept the bats banging, every so often used one to stroke the tube hanging from his neck.

For 15 minutes the birds stayed put. Then, in silent groups, they began to fly away. Along the sidewalks and on the lawns, people’s mouths fell open, and murmurs rippled from group to group. In the middle of it all stood the bird man, dragging on a Roi-Tan cigar.

No Return. “Fraud,” cried scientists. The bird man works at twilight, and that is when starlings go home to roost anyway. Also, the starlings were back next day. Very interesting, said the bird man, but these things take time. And had the scientists seen his credentials? In Indianapolis, for instance, where everything from klaxon horns to electric cords had been used to keep starlings from roosting at the U.S. courthouse and post office building, the bird man turned up last January. He spent a few hours on the courthouse roof, dangling what seemed to be a silver rope over the ledges and sills. Two days later there were new colonies of starlings in the park across the street, but not one on the premises of the courthouse. What’s more, they have not returned.

The bird man has done it, too, in Des Moines, Wichita, Louisville, and his home town, Great Bend, Kans. His fees are staggered to protect the customer: the Indianapolis job was worth $2,500—half is paid, and half is still to come if the birds do not return. The Mount Vernon contract calls for $4,000 in three installments.

Otto Standke craftily dismisses his cricket bats and similar flasheries, says they have no meaning; the real secret is contained in a doubly locked metal box, which he opens in the presence of no man. He is probably telling the truth, for the best guess entomologists have made about his methods is that he knows just how much poison a starling can take without dying, sprinkles it around while diverting onlookers’ attention with his noisy toys. Starlings would not want to go back for more. Perhaps the aluminum tube around his neck is just a long salt shaker full of poisonous bird seed.

Standke denies that he uses poison in his starling system, but admits he uses it on pigeons. Whether his secret is more closely related to biochemistry or to mumbo-jumbo, the bird man is in interesting company: the sixth labor of Hercules was to rid the Arcadian city of Stymphalus of its rasping birds. “When Hercules was at a loss how to drive the birds away,” writes Apollodorus, “Athena gave him brazen castanets … By clashing these, he scared the birds. They could not abide the sound.”