What a bunch of birdbrains!
Hundreds of great-tailed grackles commandeered a Houston, Texas, gas station last week, startling motorists and stunning scientists.
“I like you #birds but this kind of freaked me out,”
, an anchor for ABC13.
Dobbyn
that she was getting gas at the time — and though she had spotted grackles at the station before, she’d never seen so many on the ground.
“Typically, they are up on the power lines,” she said. “It was crazy that night. I ended up moving across the street to another gas station even though there were some there as well.”
Dobbyn was unsure what the birds would do once she got out of the car — but she said she pumped her gas without any trouble.
An avian expert explained the birdbrained behavior.
“Great-tailed grackles roost in large numbers regularly in parking lots across Texas,” Kevin McGowan of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology told the outlet. “They should be asleep in trees, but these are attracted to the bright lights of the gas station.”
The birds were so closely spaced together “to avoid direct conflicts,” he explained.
And Richard Prum, an ornithology professor at Yale, told the outlet that the birds’ night roost may have been disturbed — so they came to the gas station in search of a “safe space” that is “well-lit and not too disturbed.”
UCLA Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Professor Thomas Smith speculated that the lights may have confused them.
“They are not feeding,” he told BuzzFeed. “I don’t recall ever seeing this before.”
