Customer captures bird on camera inside Walmart eating food for weeks

KATY, Texas -- There are plenty of birds hanging around outside the Walmart on Market Place Drive in Katy. Ranell Roy is only worried about one.

"When I hit the corner, my first reaction was really" said Roy.

A single grackle managed to get inside the store and Roy watched it for weeks.

He snapped pictures of it on the bread aisle. The next week, he decided to shoot video as the bird was pecking away at some packaged steak.

"It's been gaining some weight," he said. "Definitely not a vegan."

After watching the bird, he brought it to an employee's attention.

"There's an employee about ten feet away stocking the meat on the shelves," Roy recalled. "So I tap her like hey ma'am either Walmart has some really fresh product or there's a wild bird right behind you."

Roy was sure after two week of bird watching inside the store that it would be gone.

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Troublesome 'devil birds' spread across U.S.

SAN FRANCISCO — In Houston, they tried air cannons so loud neighbors called in the SWAT team. In New Mexico, it took a half-dozen men and thousands of explosives. In Austin, technicians go out night after night with heavy-duty lasers. All to battle an 8-ounce, highly adaptive bird that's colonizing the country -- and leaving behind inch-thick layers of droppings as it goes.

(right) A male great-tailed grackle in Duncanville, Texas. / David J. Ringer / National Audubon Society

The great-tailed grackle, called by some the devil bird, is lovely to look at. Males are jet-black with a violet-blue iridescent sheen to their feathers that made them prized by Aztec kings in their original range in Central America. But while they once were seen only in the most southern tip of Texas, today they're in 23 states, as far north as Montana and as far west as Washington.

That might make them nice for bird watchers. But for residents of areas they colonize, not so much. Grackles tend to congregate in large flocks and like shopping centers and fast-food store parking lots, where there's trash for food and trees or light posts for perching. Their droppings can spread disease, and they can damage citrus crops.

They're also known for their annoying, almost mechanical call that begins at dawn and dusk. Add to that their frequent attacks on other birds, and they're simply not good neighbors.

"They're an unstoppable machine," said Alan Clark, a bird biologist at Fordham University in New York City. "They're really hard to scare, they're hard to kill and they're in such huge groups that even poison isn't particularly effective."

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