Murder!!

June 5, 2006 4:37 AM

Something is killing birds and dumping them in our pool.

We have an in-ground pool in the back yard, and we're finding on average a bird or two a day floating in the pool or in the skimmer basket. On a couple record days we've found five and six.

Of course, first I was all "BIRD FLU!!1", but the birds have plainly been killed by something - they have all the markings of something that's been mauled around a bit but not consumed or eaten.

I've seen neighborhood cats in the back yard, and there's a huge, fat groundhog we call "Peachy", cause he eats the fruit off the ornamental peach tree, and there's a possum or two. I'm really curious about the dumping-them-in-the-pool aspect of the whole thing - if it's a cat, don't they usually lovingly drape dead things across the stoop or something? Is it a cat that's mad at me? Has Peachy gone utterly mad? Is it something else?

posted by ersatzkat to Pets & Animals (8 answers total)

I know grackles will do that to baby birds.
posted by Lord_Pall at 5:19 AM on June 5, 2006

Back when I was a kid this happened to us a couple of times. What happened was, the neighbor cat would attack the bird, the bird, badly injured, would struggle away, and then it would fall into the pool, where the neighbor cat could not reach it, and drown.
posted by posadnitsa at 5:25 AM on June 5, 2006

Sounds a lot like a cat. Our indoor cats like to drown their toys in the water dish after "killing" them. I'm sure the instinct transfers to the great outdoors.
posted by croutonsupafreak at 6:26 AM on June 5, 2006

Are the birds' guts missing? A pair of hawks has taken up residence in my neighbor's yard, and she finds dead birds with the guts missing all the time.
posted by needs more cowbell at 7:12 AM on June 5, 2006

Is there a large window or anything reflective above the pool?
posted by 517 at 8:03 AM on June 5, 2006

I had birds that suicided in my pool. My pool was backed up against a woodsy area of my back yard, so I ended up with a lot of fly-over bugs or water-walking bugs that came out of the trees. I watched, one afternoon, as a bird swooped down over the water, grabbing up what he tought of as a feast.

Because of my bug problem, my water was on the high-end of clorination, so I imagine if a bird ever made it into the water, he'd die an awful, chemical death.

I had a similar problem with squirrels, but that was at a different time of year -- I had a couple of tree dancing squirrels that would augment their danger level by using the branches that hung over the pool. Sure enough, one suddenly cold night in September, before I had closed up the pool for the season, I found a couple of squirrels under a thin layer of ice.
posted by thanotopsis at 8:30 AM on June 5, 2006

I'd look into setting up a videocam.
posted by orange swan at 10:46 AM on June 5, 2006

I had a backyard pool in which birds were found constantly. Sometimes they would get trapped under the solar cover(are those still in use?) and drown. Sometimes they'd pop in for a toxic drink/bath.

Any mangling was chalked up to the jets, intakes and filter trap tossing the lifeless bird body.
posted by mnology at 2:05 PM on June 5, 2006