Starling

I have selected the starling (see my earlier post, below) as the theme for this month's nature notes:

Tidying up a friend’s garden the other day, I was distracted by the noise of starlings on the nearby housetops. These are familiar urban birds, and still one of our commonest species - though, as we shall see later, numbers have been falling. You are more likely to see numbers of starlings in winter, as their population is greatly increased by winter migrants from continental Europe.

Starlings are great mimics, and the variety of sounds coming from the group near where I was gardening was quite entertaining. They are lively, quick-witted birds, exploiting a variety of food sources, though they are mostly insect-eaters. They are the tough guys of the bird-table world, argumentative and loud, and when a squad arrives, everyone else gets pushed out.

Winter starlings are quite spotty, especially on the breast - more than in summer - because the new feathers acquired in the autumn moult are tipped with white. The somewhat scraggy throat feathers which stick out when starlings are calling give it a rather raffish ‘lad-about-town’ image. A long narrow bill, black in winter but yellow in summer, allows the starling to dig very efficiently for grubs, worms and subterranean insects, and flocks are found with redwings and fieldfares in winter fields.

The starling is a bird of Europe and Asia, but it has been introduced to, for example, North America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Its lively and rather combative style makes it a somewhat unwelcome addition to the fauna of these places, as it competes successfully against native species for nesting sites and food sources, as well as being a problem for farmers and fruit-growers.

In the UK, especially in England, starling numbers have fallen a lot in recent years - perhaps to the order of an 80% decline. It is hard to be sure why this has happened, and there is probably no single factor to blame. While our garden bird feeders tend to exclude starlings in favour of ‘nicer’ birds like blue tits and robins, and there have been serious attempts to drive starlings out of the city centres where they often roosted in some numbers on building ledges, one important reason for decline is likely to be the fall in the number of small mixed farms and the amount of permanent pasture, an important winter food source for starlings.

Nonetheless, in the right place - marshlands and estuaries, for example - it is still possible to see huge winter flocks, known as murmurations, reaching their height at about sunset, as starlings gather to roost in numbers, twisting and turning across each other in flight like smoke against the sky. In Scandinavia this effect is called the ‘black sun’. Such large flocks inevitably attract the attention of predators like sparrow hawks and peregrines, though at the same time to gather in such numbers provides a safer environment for each individual bird.