You must have something they like..

Are they migrating?

Looks like an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

I have a bought sparrow trap. It has 3 compartments, 1 on each side that are traps and a third compartment, in the middle, that the sparrows can get into, but not out of, to act as bait birds when you reset the trap. It works well, except that catching 2 sparrows at a time and having to reset is time consuming and makes no real dent in the sparrow population.

My friend Sandy had a sparrow sized gap, version of the Swedish Crow trap that worked fantastic. She usually caught around 12,000 to 15,000 sparrows and starlings a year in it. It was basically a wire box, 6' tall on the sides, sloping down to 5' in the middle, with a 3" framed gap in the middle. It's footprint on the ground was 6' by 6' The birds would land on the peaks on the sides, hop down the wire to the gap and drop in. They could not fly back out. She rarely baited it. She took out the dead sparrows and starlings once a day and the live ones continuously lured more in. She often would catch a few hundred birds a day during the fall.

Here's a video of a Swedish Crow trap. They are called ladder traps too.



Sandy"s trap didn't have the rungs and worked fine without them. The gap should be sized for what you're trying to catch.

I just quickly put a trap together, out of some existing chickenwire panels, for my friend Ralph once, where I just left the top flat with a gap in the middle, to catch pigeons and it worked to.

You need to make the door big enough to easily get dead or live birds out, if you want them live, but small enough that you can block the bait birds from escaping.

During the migrations, you will have to take birds out several times a day or it will get so full you won't catch any more.

Cowbirds and Cooper's hawks frequently got in Sandy's trap too.

Keith