Just as the starlings are becoming noticeably active, at the peak of their breeding season, is a good time for this post. In fact, I can hear them right now as I write this.
These thoughts have been waiting in the wings now for a long time, since about a year ago, when I became fully enamoured of sturnus vulgaris, the European starling. People don’t give much thought to the lowly starling. Even those with a positive interest in wildlife often ignore these commoners among birds, favouring romantic rarities such as golden eagles.
I’ve seen golden eagles and they are indeed magnificent. The first time I saw one was with Stu on Ben Cruachan, our first munro. We had stopped for a rest on a rocky outcrop, looking out over a steep drop into the deep bowl of the mountain. And then, echoing around the natural amphitheatre came the sound which, though I hadn’t heard it before, chimed within me, so that when Stu said it must be an eagle I felt I already knew it. It was a harbinger, or a theatrical cue, so we looked about for it in the hope that it might enter the stage, and seconds later there it was, gliding around our crag, maybe twenty metres away and below us. The backs of its wings were shining in the sun, a sight denied to most people, who see only its silhouette high above.
Stirring romantic nobility is not the appeal of the starling. But take a closer look and you’ll find much more than that. If you are as I was not so long ago, a starling ignoramus, then let me be your guide to the wonderful world of this amazing little creature, my favourite bird (though obviously the bullfinch comes a close second.)
To begin, I want to tell you a story. It’s about time I got this out in the open. To be honest this whole post is a kind of catharsis for me, because of what happened…
Back when I was young, I answered an advert claiming I could make £1000 in a week. I had to go around the streets of some town or other – a different one of my choice every day – trying to sell various kinds of junk to shop assistants, mechanics, receptionists, butchers, pub regulars, bricklayers, and car salesmen. I lasted in the job (can it even be called a job when you end up with less money than you’ve put in?) for only a month, because I wasn’t any good and I lost money and I was miserable.
Anyway, one morning I was in an industrial estate in Renfrew (I have nothing against Renfrew and I know it has a lovely park and a great physiographical location and copious historical importance, but what is it about the phrase industrial estate in Renfrew that makes my heart sink? The astute amongst you will answer because it reminds you of an unhappy time in your life, stupid! And I cannot deny it – sniff – but I think there’s an objective dismality in it also.)
I stopped to get a roll and sausage for breakfast at one of those little greasy caff vans, which was parked up and cooking away on the edge of an expansively empty car park. This one even had tables and chairs scattered around it, under the shade of a couple of oak trees. I, the sole customer, was sitting at a table eating my roll when a starling appeared in front of me, perched on the back of a chair at a neighbouring table. It started eyeing me up, as intelligent birds do, by cocking its head at various angles to take me in fully with its eyes. Others appeared to my right and left, and one or two started swaggering nonchalantly on the ground. I looked up and saw that several had arrived on an overhanging branch. They can be aggressive little birds with gangsterish habits, and those beaks are like little daggers. They were very menacing and I was quite unnerved. It was clear that they knew this spot for its rich pickings, and I knew that they were cocky enough not just to wait for crumbs but to try to actually steal my food, or, I imagined, physically attack me so as to make me drop it, as crows and gulls do to hawks and herons.
Well, it came to nothing, but I wanted to make it clear that my love for starlings is not without an edge of bitter fear.
Starlings are very excellent, because:
They have iridescent plumage;
They gather in flocks up to one million birds strong, which create fantastical patterns in the sky;
They imitate sounds that they hear around them – every starling has an amazing repertoire, and they can even be taught to imitate a human voice perfectly.
Iridescent plumage
It’s not easy to convey this in phototgraphs, because appreciating iridescence really depends on seeing the object move in the light. Iridescence is the property of surfaces whose colour changes with the angle from which they are viewed. Soapy bubbles, oil slicks, some butterflys: you know what I’m talking about. Starling plumage is alternately green and violet. I don’t always see this, so it’s possible that their feathers have this quality only at certain times of year, or it might be that only the males have it. If anybody’s interested there’s a study entitled Plumage Reflectance and the Objective Assessment of Avian Sexual Dichromatism (PDF), published in the American Naturalist, which comes to some conclusions about sex differences and the use of iridescence in signalling. In any case, the fact that male starlings display their feathers in courtship suggests that the iridescence is sexually selected.
Flocking
Last year I caught glimpses of huge starling flocks from the M74 near Ecclefechan. Although it was difficult to see much, it was stunning. They gather like this in the autumn and through the winter I think, probably in the same place for several years running. For hours in the afternoon and into dusk, birds from miles around come to form a flock which can be about one million strong. Seeing the sheer size of these flocks, and the patterns they make as they move through the sky like some amorphous creature with indivisible purpose, is breathtaking.
These videos really are worth a look:
Starlings on Ot Moor
Feeding flock
Flocking at dusk
This all reminded me of something I hadn’t thought about for a long time. When I was a teenager I would sometimes see them flocking like this around the railway bridge over the Clyde as I got the train home to Largs. The flock would sweep up into the sky, over the bridge and then under it, in a big circle.
To be a good flock-member, all an individual starling has to do is memorize the following rules:
Steer to avoid crowding local flockmates (Separation)
Steer towards the average heading of local flockmates (Alignment)
Steer to move toward the average position of local flockmates (Cohesion)
This is the flocking algorithm, first worked out in 1986 by Craig Reynolds, and demonstrated in his program Boids. It became very big in the world of computer graphics and is used, I think, quite heavily in games and movies.
But what about velocity? I guess in the rules above we’re assuming identical velocities? Well, the mathematics and programming code are available all over the place, so I needn’t go into it all here.
Incidentally, it’s not just starlings that do this. Herring and sardine are famous for it (though we tend to call their groups shoals rather than flocks.)
Song
Last summer I was relaxing in the back garden, casually watching a small group of starlings feeding from a block of fat. But there was one starling that wasn’t interested in eating, only in singing. Starlings are commonly known for their chatter and noisiness, but listen to them carefully. This one was a virtuoso and sang with style and gusto for about 10 minutes, far out-performing any of its companions. It was making a huge variety of sounds, a mixture of melodious pure tones and repetitive clicks and chirps. There was complexity, richness and weirdness in the sounds, and I was enraptured, never mind any female starlings within hearing distance (although unlike them I would always stop short before actually mating with a starling, male or female). At one point it seemed to be overlaying different sounds, melodic calls on top of a constant high-frequency click repetition, like a kind of beatboxing.
They are renowned for their ability to mimic other sounds. Those living in the vicinity of a building site will incorporate the sounds of cement mixers, drills and human shouting into their songs. I myself have heard them imitating blackbirds and pneumatic drills (jackhammers to our North American friends).
There’s an excellent sound file on this page which I strongly urge you to listen to. You can hear, among other things, a magpie, a blackbird, a dog’s bark and what sounds like somebody hammering a fencepost into the ground. Obviously a suburban starling. There are lots of talking starlings on YouTube as well, such as this one. Incidentally, they are related to minah birds, which are perhaps more famous as amazing mimics.
What better way to end this post than with Shakespeare, from Henry IV:
“The King forbade my tongue to speak of Mortimer. But I will find him when he is asleep, and in his ear I’ll holler Mortimer! Nay I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but Mortimer, and give it to him to keep his anger still in motion.”
In the article in which I found this quoted, it says:
“This is the only instance where Shakespeare mentions starlings.”
Starlings are awesome! Thankyou for posting the link on my Livejournal :)
Kate the Twernip