It's rice planting time in the area. Like clockwork, gigantic, monstrous, humongous flocks of blackbirds show up. The sheer multitude of these birds make it hard to farm. If you don't do something about it, they will fly in in large waves and eat up every last grain of rice. As soon as you plant it, they gobble it up. Here is a very small representation of what I'm talking about in my neighbor's pasture that borders a rice field.
When I was farming, we would ride around in pickup trucks with a 12 gauge shotgun and pepper them to kill them or at least keep them moving. To give you an idea of the size and scope of the problem, a good friend of mine once headed up a taskforce at a local USDA office that dealt with problem wildlife like birds around airports and, yes, birds eating farmers' rice. This time of year was very busy, hiring people to try to eradicate or at least scare the birds away. The blackbirds roost in cane and nearby trees. They make a lot of racket and when the fly over you, it is amazing how many of them there are.
One of the things that we would also do when farming was the use of scare guns. A scare gun is a mechanical device on a timer that is powered by a propane bottle. You set it on the edge of your rice field in areas with heavy black bird pressure. The gun fires off every so often to hopefully keep them moving and stop their all you can eat buffet in your rice field. It is a successful strategy at least early on, until the birds get immune to the noise. It's better to have a gun that knocks some down instead of merely making a loud noise. I think they need to see some of their dead brethren on the ground for it to be some sort of a deterrent.
What's going on increasingly is a migration. Not only the migration of blackbirds, but the migration of people moving out of the city to enjoy country life. The sunrises and sunsets. The serenity of the great outdoors. The slower pace of living and wide open spaces. But when they move, I don't think they completely understand that they are moving out of neatly manicured neighborhoods and in the midst of working farms where crop dusters fly overhead early in the morning, where dust from tractors blows when plowing, where cows moo, roosters crow, and the smell may not always be appealing. There is also the noise from irrigation wells running 24/7, from dryer motors running all day and night for weeks on end during harvest times, and yes, from scare guns during planting time.
Tensions came to a head at a recent Jefferson Davis Policy Jury meeting in which upset residents expressed displeasure with the noise of scare guns. The Police Jury listened to both sides of the argument. Fortunately for the farmers (and unfortunately for the people who recently built homes in the middle of a rice field), there are existing "Right to Farm" statutes sitting on the books that protecting the farmers' right to farm. In other words, they can continue to use the scare guns to prevent their crops from being eaten by the birds.
While I enjoy a peaceful night's sleep as much as the next guy, I also like to eat rice! Moving to the country has it's positives for sure. That's why I'm here, but before one moves, he or she should consider all the pros and cons. I remember a couple that moved out to Hooterville from Manhattan. Things were sure different for them, weren't they?
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Green Acres is the place for me
Farm Livin' is the life for me
Land stretchin' out from far and wide
Keep Manhattan, just gimme that countryside...
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