Neighbors Sound Out Remedy for Bird Flock

The government bureaucrats have met, detailed strategies have been hatched, and chemical agents have been sprayed.

But is it possible that two women have found a down-home way to beat back the confounding and ever-so-annoying swarms of starlings that invade their Capitol Hill block every summer?

These are the birds that drop enough fecal matter -- poop, as it's known in less ornithological circles -- to turn sidewalks and parked cars into something resembling a Jackson Pollock painting.

Except that it doesn't quite smell like paint.

"Like a dead corpse" is the way Elbert Pair puts it. Pair, 58, a woodworker, lives in the 1600 block of Potomac Avenue SE, where the annual bird invasion summons breathless comparisons to a certain Hitchcock film.

But Jennifer Smira, 30, and Aimee Mavragis, 33, might have found an answer, at least for their end of the street, suggested by an acquaintance who claimed to have vanquished the starlings in Indianapolis.

Their combat tools are the metal lids of pots and pans, which they bring outdoors at twilight, when the birds arrive to begin roosting in the trees that line their street.

Then, in what could be described as an only-on-Potomac-Avenue war dance, the women clang their lids together as if they were cymbals, whipping up enough of a ruckus that the birds fly off, they say.

"That's why our street is cleaner," Mavragis said Friday, showing off her relatively poop-free patch of Potomac Avenue.

If only there were a happy ending for everyone.

While the women are claiming a measure of victory, residents who live two blocks over on 15th Street have begun to notice a thicket of starlings migrating there.

Tom Carter, who lives on 15th Street, said that the trees outside his house fill with starlings every night and that the next morning his sidewalk is splattered with a pasty concoction that draws swarms of flies.