Birds
Starling
Sturnidae · also called starlings, mynas
A starling is a small, glossy, argumentative bird that does two spectacular things. It gathers on winter evenings into flocks of hundreds of thousands that pour across the sky in folding, shifting shapes — murmurations — and it sings a rambling improvised medley stitched together from every sound it has ever heard, including car alarms and, in Mozart’s pet, a phrase of one of his concertos.
Overview
Starlings are the family Sturnidae, around 120 species, native to Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. They are stocky, iridescent, highly social omnivores, mostly cavity nesters. The family includes the birds called starlings and the Asian mynas — there is no real line between them. The common starling and common myna are now on every continent except Antarctica as introduced species.
Murmurations
Over a winter roost, starlings wheel in flocks that reach hundreds of thousands, each bird tracking only its six or seven nearest neighbours — so a turn ripples across the whole flock in a fraction of a second, confusing hawks.
The mimic’s song
A male starling builds a long, loose song from a personal library of imitations that he keeps adding to for life, and females prefer males with bigger repertoires. Mozart kept a starling that could sing his music, and gave it a funeral.
An invasion from 100 birds
About 100 common starlings released in New York’s Central Park in the 1890s are the ancestors of the 150 to 200 million now across North America — one of the continent’s most damaging introduced birds.
Status
Starlings as a family are Not Evaluated, trend decreasing. The common starling is superabundant where introduced but has fallen ~50 per cent in Britain since the 1970s from farming changes. Many Asian species are threatened by the cage-bird trade, with the Bali myna Critically Endangered and down to a tiny wild population.
Starling: common questions
How does a starling murmuration work?
A murmuration is self-organised, with no leader and no plan. Each starling in the flock pays attention to roughly its six or seven nearest neighbours, matching their speed and direction and keeping a set distance, and it does this constantly and very fast. Because every bird is doing the same thing, a turn started by a few birds at the edge, often in response to a hawk, propagates across the entire flock as a wave in well under a second, faster than the birds could react to a signal from far away. The result is the fluid, folding, blackening-and-thinning shapes seen over winter roosts, which make it hard for a predator to lock onto any single target.
Why are starlings such good mimics?
Mimicry is built into how a starling sings and how it chooses a mate. A male starling's song is a long, loosely structured medley rather than a fixed tune, and he assembles it from a personal library of sounds that he keeps adding to throughout his life, including imitations of other birds, mechanical noises, and human whistles. Females appear to prefer males with larger and more varied repertoires, which are a sign of age and experience, so there is a direct payoff for collecting new sounds. The starling's vocal organ, the syrinx, is also unusually flexible, and captive starlings can be trained to reproduce whole spoken phrases.
Are starlings a problem, and should I discourage them?
It depends where you are. In North America, Australia, South Africa, and other regions where the common starling was introduced, it is a serious pest that competes aggressively with native cavity-nesting birds such as bluebirds and woodpeckers, damages fruit and grain crops, fouls buildings and feedlots, and forms roosts of hundreds of thousands. There, deterring them from nest boxes and crops is reasonable. In their native Europe and Asia, common starlings are declining and are a bird of conservation concern, and the huge historic flocks are much reduced, so in Britain and much of Europe they are welcomed rather than discouraged. The Bali myna and several other family members are among the world's rarest birds.
What is the connection between starlings and mynas?
Mynas are simply Asian starlings. The family Sturnidae contains both the birds English speakers call starlings, mostly European and African, and the birds called mynas, mostly South and Southeast Asian, and there is no sharp line between them. The common myna and the common starling are close relatives with very similar habits, both bold, adaptable, omnivorous, cavity-nesting, and both now widespread invasive species. The hill myna, famous as a talking cage bird, is another sturnid, as is the beautiful and Critically Endangered Bali myna. So a myna is a starling by another name.