Tim Melling: I was recently watching and photographing Starlings in the garden and was surprised to see how much time they waste squabbling over the abundant food. They even squabbled over the bird baths which can comfortably fit five Starlings together. It seemed to be mainly the “teenage” Starlings that did most of the fighting and whenever an adult was engaged then it seemed to capitulate quickly. But teenage battles were frequent and prolonged, probably trying to sort their positions out in the developing pecking order. Young Starlings, when they have first fledged, are a plain brown colour all over but soon start to moult into spotted adult plumage. In late summer they look like a tatty patchwork quilt, each of them sporting a black waistcoat with pale polka dots with further developing areas of adult plumage on the wings and back. All freshly moulted Starlings have these pale spots but they will mostly have worn off by Spring leaving the birds looking immaculate glossy black. These two were in a sustained aerial battle over a fat ball. Their combat positions are so similar that it looks like one is fighting his own reflection in a mirror, or maybe playing pat-a-cake. The light was good so I used a fast shutter speed (1/3200) but that still wasn’t fast enough to freeze the wings.
The original Old English name for this bird was “Stare” and from the eleventh century the “ling” part was added, but only for young birds of this species. The name Stare persisted in the literature until the late eighteenth century, after which the name Starling prevailed. Its scientific name Sturnus vulgaris translates as Common Starling, and it is still common, but is red-listed because of a more than 50% population decline in Britain. According to the BTO there are 1.8 million breeding pairs in Britain, but forty years ago the population was more than 4 million pairs. They have also declined on the Continent too, which means we get fewer in Britain in the winter. I remember 40 years ago when spectacular murmurations used to occur in almost all town centres as Starlings came in to roost on buildings. But most buildings are now proofed to deter roosting birds, and the numbers have declined as well, so nowadays murmurations are not commonplace and people travel to see them.
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When I lived in Birmingham over forty years ago there were huge numbers roosting in the city centre and it was well worth getting into or on to the flat roof of a high building to watch this spectacular of well over 1 million starlings coming to roost followed by several Sparrowhawks and even then the odd Peregrine. One of the Peregrines used to regularly roost on a tower block at Five Ways. Starlings are fantastic birds except to get out of mist nets!
The Swedish word for Starling is “Stare”.
In the early fifties winter-roosting starlings killed off a mixed willow- and-hawthorn, four-acre “fox covert”with their excrement and vast weight on my parents’ mixed arable and livestock farm at Leven in the East Riding.
In the mid-fifties I remember the awe-inspiring murmurings and whistling of thousands of roosting starlings in Trafalgar Square on a thirdform Beverley Grammar School trip to Paris.