Common starling

Name and taxonomy

Carl Linnaeus named the species in 1758, and the name has not changed since. Sturnus is the Latin word for a starling and vulgaris means common. The Old English name was staer, later stare, and it imitated the bird's call. Starling first appears in the 11th century as a word for the young bird. By the 16th century starling had replaced stare for birds of any age.

North Americans call it the European starling, and British birders simply say starling. About 12 subspecies breed across the native range, and they grade into one another. Because the change is gradual, authorities disagree on how many races to accept. Island birds of Shetland, the Faroes and the Outer Hebrides are darker and slightly larger.

Evolution and relatives

The starling family, Sturnidae, is an Old World group, richest in Southeast Asia and Africa. The genus Sturnus is polyphyletic, so its members do not all share one recent ancestor. The nearest relative is the spotless starling of Iberia and northwest Africa. That bird may descend from a population that sheltered in Iberia during an ice age. Gene studies suggest it could even be counted as a subspecies of the common starling.

There is more genetic variation inside the common starling than between the two species. Remains of the common starling are known from the Middle Pleistocene. The family has a thin fossil record, which is part of why relationships stay unclear. The two species now meet in southwestern France and northwestern Spain and compete there.

Appearance

The feathers are iridescent black, glossed with purple or green. Fresh autumn feathers carry white or buff tips, which give the winter bird its spangled look. Those pale tips wear off by spring, so the breeding bird looks much plainer. The bill is narrow, conical and sharp, yellow in summer and brownish-black in winter. The legs are stout and pinkish-red, which suits a bird that walks rather than hops.

Adults are 19 to 23 cm long and weigh 58 to 101 g. The wingspan runs 31 to 44 cm and the tail is 5.8 to 6.8 cm. The short tail, pointed wings and round belly separate it from thrushes at a glance. Juveniles are plain grey-brown and keep some brown feathers into their first winter. Iris colour tells the sexes apart, and the test is 97% accurate on its own.

Habitat and range

The native range runs from the Azores and Europe east to western Mongolia. It covers about 8,870,000 square kilometres in all. Birds also breed in North Africa, the Middle East, northern India and northwestern China. Towns and suburbs suit them, because buildings and trees give holes to nest in. They feed on short grass: pasture, playing fields, golf courses and airfields.

Reedbeds, woods and city centres hold the winter roosts. The species avoids dense wet forest but does live on sea cliffs and among seaweed. It has been found as high as 1,900 metres above sea level. Northern and eastern birds move south and west for the winter. Migrating birds fly at 60 to 80 kilometres per hour and can cover 1,000 to 1,500 km. GBIF holds records of the species from 145 countries.

Diet and feeding

The starling eats mostly insects and other invertebrates through the breeding season. Beetles, flies, moths, caterpillars, grasshoppers, ants, spiders and earthworms all appear. Outside that season it takes seeds, grain, fruit, nectar and food waste. The family cannot handle much sucrose, though grapes and cherries cause no trouble. In cage tests birds ate 7 to 23 grams of animal food and 20 to 40 g of plant food a day.

The main method is probing: the bird drives its bill into the soil and forces it open. The skull is narrow and the jaw muscles are strong, so the eyes can look down the open bill. Konrad Lorenz first described the action, and German keeps his word zirkeln for it. Starlings also snatch insects in the air and use the same prying trick on rubbish bags. In a large flock the birds at the back keep flying to the front, where the food is untouched. Young birds take time to learn to probe, so their diet holds fewer insects at first.

Behaviour and social life

The starling is a flocking bird in every season and most of all in autumn and winter. A murmuration turns, folds and stretches with no leader at its head. Each bird follows about seven neighbours, so a change of course crosses the flock fast. The habit probably began as a defence, since a shifting mass of birds confuses a hawk. A single roost can hold up to 1.5 million birds.

Droppings under a big roost pile up to 30 cm deep and kill the trees beneath. In small amounts the same droppings fertilise the ground, so foresters move roosts about. The Danish marshes near Tonder and Ribe draw flocks of more than a million in March. Danes call that spring display sort sol, which means black sun. Birds walk and run on the ground and fly straight, with fast beats and short glides.

Communication and senses

The male sings in bouts that run for a minute or more. A bout starts with pure whistles, moves through copied sounds, then clicks, then high notes. A skilled male holds up to 35 song types and as many as 14 kinds of click. One wild bird copied a sound after hearing it a single time. Older males sing more types, pair earlier and raise more young.

The male's syrinx, the voice organ, is about 35% larger than the female's. Females sing too, though less often, and the reason is not understood. Eleven other calls are described, among them a flock call, a threat call and a snarl. Alarm comes out as a harsh scream, and feeding birds squabble without a break. The wings of a passing flock make a whoosh that carries hundreds of metres.

Reproduction and life cycle

An unpaired male picks a hole and starts a nest to attract a female. He decorates it with flowers and fresh greenery, and herbs such as yarrow draw females in by scent. The female pulls the decoration out once she accepts him. The pair then lines the hole with straw, grass, feathers and wool over four or five days. Nests sit in tree holes, buildings, stumps and nest boxes, and in cliffs on Shetland.

The female lays four or five glossy pale blue eggs, one a day. Each egg is 26.5 to 34.5 millimetres long and up to 22.5 mm across. Both parents incubate for about 13 days, and the female sits alone at night. Chicks hatch blind and bare and grow down within seven days. Both parents feed them in the nest for about three weeks, then for another week or two outside.

Two broods a year are usual, and three are possible in the south. Unpaired females often slip an egg into another pair's nest. Between 48% and 79% of nests fledge young, but only 20% of nestlings reach breeding age. About 60% of adults survive from one year to the next. The average life is 2 to 3 years, and the record bird lived 22 years and 11 months.

Predators and threats

Most starling predators are birds, and the flock's answer is to take off together. Sparrowhawks, goshawks, peregrine falcons, hobbies and kestrels catch adults. Kites, buzzards and imperial eagles take the slower young birds. Little owls, long-eared owls, barn owls, tawny owls and eagle-owls take roosting birds at night. Stoats, raccoons, squirrels and cats raid nests or catch careless adults.

Parasites are almost universal in this species. Every one of three hundred birds checked across six American states carried at least one kind. Fleas, mites and ticks were on 99% of them, and worms inside 95%. The gapeworm moves from the lungs to the windpipe and can choke its host. Numbers in northern Europe have fallen since the 1980s as farming grew more intensive.

Population and conservation

The world population is put at more than 310 million birds. The IUCN lists the species as Least Concern, because that total is not falling much overall. Numbers grew across Europe from the 19th century until about the 1960s. The bird spread into Ireland and parts of Scotland from about 1830. It began breeding in northern Sweden in 1850 and in Iceland in 1935.

Since 1980 the picture has reversed across northern and central Europe. Several countries have red-listed the bird after declines of more than 50%. The United Kingdom lost more than 80% of its starlings between 1966 and 2004. Young birds survive poorly, because pasture and meadow hold fewer insects than before. Chicks need grassland invertebrates, so the loss of old pasture hits them hardest.

Relationship with humans

Farmers once welcomed the starling, because it eats wireworms and other crop pests. About 25 million nest boxes went up for the species in the former Soviet Union. That reputation carried the bird abroad, first to New Zealand in 1862 and Melbourne in 1857. Eugene Schieffelin released 60 birds in Central Park in 1890 and 40 more the next year. North America now holds an estimated 150 million starlings.

The IUCN counts the starling among the 100 worst invasive species on Earth. It takes nest holes from woodpeckers, bluebirds, martins and rosellas. Crop damage in the United States is put at about US$800 million a year. Flocks are a hazard to aircraft, and a strike near Boston in 1960 killed 62 people. The United States culled 1.7 million starlings in 2008, more than any other nuisance animal. Western Australia has kept the bird out, and only 300 were left in the state by 2009.

In culture and myth

In the medieval Welsh Mabinogion, Branwen tames a starling and teaches it words. She sends it over the Irish Sea carrying word to her brothers in Wales. Pliny the Elder wrote that starlings could be taught whole sentences in Latin and Greek. In Henry IV, Shakespeare has Hotspur plan to teach a starling one name to torment the king. That single line is probably why Americans tie the bird to Shakespeare.

Mozart kept a pet starling that sang a phrase from one of his piano concertos. He bought the bird after it sang music he had written six weeks earlier. He held an elaborate funeral for it three years later. Konrad Lorenz called the starling the poor man's dog, because anyone could raise one. After the pigeon, it is the bird most used in laboratories.

The story that Schieffelin wanted every Shakespeare bird in America has no early record. It first appears in the 1940s, in an essay by the naturalist Edwin Way Teale. In 1949 so many starlings landed on Big Ben that the clock hands stopped. A 1954 episode of The Goon Show mocked the failed attempts to clear London's roosts. Some Arab countries trap starlings for food, and the tough meat goes into a casserole or a pate.