Dennis Paulson:
>This is a classic case of the no-brain bird approach to "problem-solving."
>And I've always thought that starlings were reasonably intelligent as birds
>go.

House sparrows are similarly limited in their problem solving ability.
We trap them (for use as lure birds in raptor banding) using a funnel
trap. Basically it is a big hardware cloth box with two tunnels
leading inside from two opposing walls. They meet at a smaller
box inside the big box. A "funnel" (more like a tube) of
hardware cloth exits the smaller box like an angled chimney (imagine
the folks at Pisa built it).

Birdseed is placed into the interior box. The house sparrows
walk through either of the tunnels to get to the seed. They
never figure out that they can walk back out the way they came
in. Eventually, the urge to fly comes upon them at they
fly up the "funnel" and into the big box. They never figure
out that they can fly back down and out, of course.

These work really well, and we make the traps fairly large. Put
a dish of water inside, and of course lots of birdseed's scattered
about, put it where house sparrows hang out (one of our volunteer's
back yard works well), go away for a few hours, and presto! A
couple of dozen house sparrows.

(The tunnels are too small for robins or starlings to enter. We
also trap starlings using "v-traps")

When our pigeons, those supposed einsteins of the bird world,
get loose at our site, we catch 'em with a big salmon-sized
fishing net ductaped to an eight-foot pole. They never learn
to associate person-with-net and getting caught and stuck back
in the aviary.

You just walk up and net 'em.

Tried this with a Cooper's hawk, once, and didn't succeed :)

- Don Baccus, Portland OR <donb at rational.com>