Thank You, Shakespeare: Starlings

There’s a racket going on inside the fireplace. This is the second time this spring. A bird has mistaken the chimney for a home, and, once it tumbled down that pipe, it can’t go back up. So it’s fluttering and bumping around in there trying to get out. After some attempts that sound like they’d hurt, the bird squeezes through a vent into the space around the fire box. Bryan carefully stages a box intended to catch the bird as it escapes out the front of the fireplace. He misses though, and the bird is now flying around the living room, looking for another escape hatch. Bryan  captures it in a box while Dave the yellow lab looks on with interest. The bird screams in fear–or outrage–and Dave thinks wow, a new squeaky toy! Bryan manages to capture it in the box and takes it outside. He lets it loose and, confused, the bird sits next to the box for a minute, and then flies into the siding on the porch. We shoo it out into the open yard. Within a few minutes it has regained its senses and flies away to a nearby tree. Dave gnaws a bone in lieu of that amazing squeaky toy. The bird is safe from Dave and us, but we fervently wish it hadn’t played Santa Claus.

The bird is a European starling (Sturnus vulgaris). Its ancestors are not native to North America. They have Shakespeare to thank for their massive presence in the New World. It seems that some Shakespeare lovers decided to have all birds that Shakespeare mentions present in New York. To that end, in 1890 they released 100 pairs of starlings into Central Park in New York City. Only about 15 of those pairs survived, but they have gone on to multiply like the loaves and fishes, so that today millions of starlings make their homes in all corners of North America. Ironically, Shakespeare only mentions them once, in Henry IV, Part I.

They are highly social, aggressive birds that we’ve all heard making a racket as they totally cover a tree. These flocks of starlings, which can be found everywhere except Antarctica nowadays, are called a murmuration, no doubt because of all their vocal hijinks. They have a whole palette of sounds of their own, including warbles, clicks, whistles, creaks, chirrups, snarls, chips and gurgles. They can also imitate the calls of other birds, and some have added goats, frogs, cats and mechanical sounds to their repertoire. We’ve seen them take over the bird feeder, cleaning it out on a daily basis since their arrival on Owl Acres in late February or early March. Because they are so aggressive, they have pushed native birds out of their ecological niches and sometimes take over their nests. They are intelligent as birds go, and also prolific, raising two or even three broods each year.

The starling gets its name because of its shape. It has pointed, triangular wings, a long bill and short tail, which reminds people of a four-pointed star. When adults molt in the fall, exchanging old feathers for new ones, the new feathers have white tips that show up as white splashes against their general coloration of deep brown to black. Throughout the winter, these white tips wear away, leaving them in their dark spring plumage with an iridescent sheen of greens and purples.

These generally black birds are about eight and a half inches long with a wing span of 15 inches. They are strong fliers and have been clocked at 48 miles an hour. They will eat just about anything, which gives them the advantage over more specialized native species. It also means they can live just about anywhere, and do, and they live a long time—up to 15 years in the wild. In cities and towns, they flock together and can be seen walking in a line across the grass, stabbing their bills into the dirt every few steps to see what they can find to eat. In the countryside, they’re more likely to be seen perched high in trees or working a field.

Large flocks of starlings are not unusual, and here is a marvelous description by Grainger Hunt, a senior scientist at the Peregrine Fund, of a flock of starlings coping with a hunting falcon:

“…a cloud of quick gray motion, a presence in the forefront, then rapid withdrawal. A dazzling cloud, swirling, pulsating, drawing together to the thinnest of waists, then wildly twisting in pulses of enlargement and diminution, a fluid choreography of funnels, ribbons, and hourglasses, spills and mixing, ever in motion. Dense in one moment, diffuse in the next.”

The starlings here are each trying to find the safest place in the flock by putting other starlings between themselves and the falcon.

We don’t have great flocks of them on Owl Acres, but the individuals we do have are making their presence known. I think it’s time to put some kind of screen over the fireplace chimney to keep them from playing Santa Claus.

Photo by C H Apperson