Doug--I certainly have no expectation of destroying, or even substantially affecting, the starling population, and I agree with you that for me, at least, there is no 11th Amendment or other political component to the question of how to handle non-native destructive species. On the other hand, when I can dispatch or deter specific starlings or sparrows in order to try and protect specific bluebirds or martins, I have no hesitation as to what is the right choice (for me). If by "another chip of our ecology" you mean that doing anything to change what exists in nature right now is a step in the wrong direction, I humbly disagree. Letting starlings flourish unabated at the expense of native species is the same, to me, as saying that kudzu should be allowed to take over the mountains of the Carolinas, zebra mussels the harbors of the Great Lakes, purple loosestrife the wetlands from Maine to Wyoming, or Ailanthus the hardwood forests of Ohio. Are those things inevitable? Maybe--probably--so. But to my way of thinking, chipping away at those predators is not harming ecology at all: Rather, they are harming what I think of as ecology by chipping away in mere decades what natural processes created over centuries. The coalmine canary function of birds is certainly important, but starlings do not perform it any better than flickers--in fact, maybe they're not as good at it, since they're such survivors--so if I can choose between seeing a nest of baby sparrows or a nest of baby bluebirds, the sparrows lose.
