I’ve never been to Eurasia, but Eurasia has come to where I live. Like humans from my ancestral gene pool, just, boom, are you really supposed to be here guys? No? Make yourself at home I guess? The most aggressive and destructive invasive bird species in my region, if not the entire USA, is the eurasian starling.
Knowing that – knowing that they will bully diminishing native species out of their nests to pump out more soldiers for the unending murmuration – I have occasionally harbored an urge to kill large numbers of them. Use their shiny little feathers to make very fancy coats. Turn their skulls into ring ornaments. But not anymore. Now I think of them more like the Lystrosaurus that became the dominant land animal in the wake of The Great Dying. When the smoke clears on this man-made extinction level event, the only life we have left will be the fittest survivors. And here they are.
Starling experiences. I saw one being murdered by a crow. Heard a squeaking sound and cast about for it. On the roof of a little barbershop, a single starling was being stabbed to death by a single crow. Each time the bigger bird’s beak came down, another squeak. Score one for native species.
In college I was eating lunch with this William Shatner-looking dude at a fancy fish restaurant on the Seattle waterfront. Gulls, crows, starlings, and house sparrows were everywhere. Shatner was distracted for a moment and a starling stole one of his pieces of fried fish. Starlings are bigger than most LBBs but smaller than the average thrush, so this was no mean feat. The fish piece probably weighed as much as the bird. Years later at a fish and chips place on Green Lake, I saw starlings all around, and knew what they were there for.
One time at the mall in Federal Way, I was walking behind it, near the big power line towers. I heard a buzz and crackle and thought there might be an issue with the towers, but looked up and the majority of that sound was coming from little beasts. I used to ride the bus with a Russian lady who told me their word for them was something like “staretsya.” I was surprised it had “star” in it.
They’re great mimics, but they do sound tinny, like a tape recorder. Their cousin the common mynah is sometimes kept as a pet, and there is a very cute video of one in Japan that knows how to say “I understand!” (“wakarimashita!”) in a bitchy voice – a hilarious lie. One time when me and my husband (then boyfriend) were walking to the bus stop in the morning, I mentioned their mimicry and he did a wolf whistle at a flock – which was instantly returned by one of them. Only time I’ve heard their mimicry so overtly. I think most of the time they’re doing natural calls, or imitating other birds, and city sounds. It’s all a burbling staticky wash.
Starlings are drab for birds in their family. Any number of starling cousins look way more flashy. But still, they’re pretty cool. Powerful iridescence. Dots (the stars?), lil light brown streaks. When they fly, they look like fighter jets. They’re amazingly adroit for mid-size birds, like they’re evolving toward hummingbird powers. They are, of course, famous for flying in excellent synchrony, in flocks that move like undulating scarves on the wind, called murmurations. The more birds, the more impressive it looks. And unfortunately, we have no shortage of them.
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Murmurations of starlings over the centre of Birmingham (UK) in autumn, when I was heading home at dusk, are one of my happy memories of university. In the middle of the cold, usually damp, somewhat grotty city there were these birds, just having some fun together at the end of their day, before they too settled in for the night. Used to cheer me right up. Still does, but there are a lot fewer of them around over here these days so it’s not as easy to see them as just looking up while walking to the bus stop in any city.
We do get them in the garden at the feeders, but a handful, I think the magpies that rule out there stop them getting too rowdy and impinging on magpie fun. I don’t know what the magpies were doing today on our side roof, maybe looking for goodies in the bits of moss that grow there, but they were cackling away having a whale of a time. They definitely do mess around with the moss because they flick bits of it onto the skylights.
i heard house sparrows are losing numbers over there too. here? not so much.
sounds like u got some sheisty but amusing neighbors.
According to Google Translate the Russion for starling is skvorets – the -ya you heard would probably be a diminutive, like -ling is in English. It’s not cognate with the English starling, which goes back to a reconstructed (storo) proto-Indo-European word for starling. skvorets goes back to a proto-Slavic word for the bird, which is derived from a word meaning scream. (Screamer in English refers to birds of the family Anhimidae, but that’s a more modern coinage.)
Word on the street is that a manually-launched photon torpedo will do for a trouble-making starling. But that might only work for ones that try to emulate Elon Musk …
stew – i can totally see how it would have sounded like that to me. it’s a cool lil word, thx again for info.
beks – they can steal shatner’s fish; i don’t much care for that guy at this point anyway.
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Yeah GAS, there was a 70% drop in house sparrow numbers in about thirty years from the late 70s. Numbers may be recovering in other parts of the UK, but they’re still dropping in England (where I am). Even to a casual watcher like me it’s obvious that there are a lot fewer of them around that when I was a kid, probably because we ripped out a lot of hedges in the 70s and 80s, and there are fewer old out buildings like barns or milking parlours with nice nesting holes, they’ve all been turned into executive homes or holiday lets, and are maintained accordingly. But we do get them at our feeders, they tend to spend winter palling around with the gang of assorted tits and finches that hang out in the bushes and take turns flitting out to the feeders.
aww! over here they nest in fuckin nonsense locations and lose eggs or chicks to a stiff breeze. sad, but they do well enough.