Random Access

Sharlene Lamarsh has a demoralizing mystery on her hands.
Why do so many of the birds who come to her Lakeview home to eat the birdseed and bread she puts out for them, have nylon ties attached to their legs?
"I've noticed it over the past three or four years," says Lamarsh, who regularly feeds the birds. "But now, there seem to be more and more of them."
The plastic tags that are tied around one of the birds' legs come in a variety of colours. They are a type of tie-down strips, with little plastic teeth that you use to tighten something down with. You loop the plastic through a ring, pull it as hard as you can and then snip off the end.
But how could someone ever get close enough to a bird to do that, wonders Lamarsh?
"For a while I thought it might have something to do with West Nile and maybe they were being tagged for some reason like that," says the Eastmount Ave. resident, who has lived in Mississauga since 1994.
But if that were the case, of course, the ends of the tags would have been cut off so that they didn't drag behind the birds and potentially catch on things.
Surely there is no way that the birds could accidentally be getting their legs caught up in the tags somehow? That just doesn't make sense to Lamarsh.
"It's really heartbreaking to see the birds struggling around the yard," says the bird lover. "You want to catch them and cut it off but, of course, you can't get close to them."
On the weekend, Lamarsh took some photographs of the birds including the one of the grackle above who is a regular visitor. You can see part of the plastic tie behind the bird's tail in the photo.
The resident called authorities for help last year, but even figuring out who to call and trying to get a straight answer out of anyone proved difficult. "They just sloughed me off," she says.
Her conclusion is that, "someone must be trapping these birds and tagging them, but then why not cut the tie off?"
Seeing so many birds hobbling around and in distress has Lamarsh upset, angry and frustrated that she can't get any answers. Worse yet it's difficult to know where to begin to ask the right questions.
She called Toronto Wildlife Services today in a bid to get help with her unlikely problem.
"There's one bird I saw the other day who won't even put his one foot down on the ground," she says. "They can't fly properly. It breaks your heart to see these birds just flopping around."
If anyone has any ideas about what's going on here, please let us know.