A field guide to Mannion’s second least favorite bird

A murmuration of starlings.  Photo by John Holmes via Wikipedia.

Yesterday was the first seasonably cold day of winter so far around here, so naturally I spent my lunch hour getting the car washed.

Not the best idea when the temperature’s below freezing and it wasn’t something I wanted to do. The day before a flock of starlings decided to take a rest stop on the telephone wires under which we’d parked the car in front of my inlaws’ house.

Polka-dotted the whole wagon, stem to stern, starboard and larboard.  I think some of them even got up inside the wheel wells and lifted the hood.

After grackles, starlings are my least favorite birds.

I’m not alone in my antipathy.  My Stokes Guide to Bird Behavior calls them “undoubtedly one of the least loved birds in North America”.  They’re pushy and aggressive and there are a lot of them.  Their “bothersome population growth seems to have no clear end in sight,” sighs Stokes.

Audubon isn’t exactly a fan either.

Conditioned by centuries of living in settled areas in Europe, it easily adapted to American cities when 100 birds were liberated in Central Park, New York City, in 1890.  Since then it has spread over most of the continent.  Its large roosts are often located on buildings and may contain tens of thousands of birds.  These congregations create much noise, foul the area, and have proved difficult to drive away.  Starlings are aggressive birds and compete with native species for nest cavities and food.  There has been much debate regarding their economic value, but their consumption of insects seems to tip the balance in their favor.

They gobble a lot of bugs.  A point in their favor.  One point.

They are raspy and rusty-voiced.  They don’t sing, they shriek, like nails being yanked from hardwood beams through tin sheeting.  They whirr. They pop. They give you the raspberry.  They mimic other birds but without respect.  They croak.  They hiss.  They whistle like tea kettles.  And they don’t shut up.  They are clever but they don’t show it.  Unlike crows who seem to get a kick out of surprising humans with their smarts, starlings mostly can’t be bothered.  And they have beady, staring, stupid, soulless eyes and they look at you sideways with a mixture of incomprehension and contempt, as if it pains them to have to try to make room in their tiny brains for the fact of you.

During their breeding season, in spring and early summer, starlings have a kind of prettiness.  Their feathers are shiny black with iridescent flashes of purple and amber and green.  Their bills are bright yellow.  Then they molt and become rat colored, their breasts and backs spotted over with dots the same white as the polka dots they decorated my car with.

When they spread out over a snowless lawn in winter they make the grass look deader and…dirty.

Starlings don’t flock. They crowd.

They crowd your lawn, by the dozen, by the dozens, like sullen teenagers with chips on their shoulders taking over the food court in a mall.  And they don’t seem to be there to do anything, even eat. 

They’re not interested in each other.  They’re not sociable like sparrows and finches.  They’re not busy and chatty like chickadees.  They’re not thoughtful and purposeful like robins.  They’re not observably family-oriented like cardinals.  They don’t even seem to be having a good time just being birds, the way blue jays appear to do.

They’re just out to take up space so that you can’t and to show you who owns the place.

I’ll give them this.  On the ground or roosting in trees or on ledges or telephone lines they are just noisy, irritable pests.  But they are fascinating in flight.  Those great clouds of black dots wheeling over fields of corn stubble and dried grass and looking like swarms of bees in a cartoon, reshaping themselves with every mass swoop, reel, bank, climb, and dive, now conical, now elliptical, now a sphere, now a muffin, now a blossom instantly collapsing into a bowl then inflating into a bulb that opens into an umbrella---I could watch them all day.

Then they spot your car.

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There’s one sort of cool fact about starlings.  Their full name is European starling.  The fact that they are here can be blamed on William Shakespeare.  Well, on some of his overly enthusiastic, bird-loving, American fans.

In answer to Ken Houghton’s question in the comments, What do I have against grackles?  I’ll tell you.

Comments

[Sean Paul Kelley]

Man, you really hate the Starlings! There are always these Starlings: http://www.flickr.com/photos/seanpaulkelley/2661000764/in/set-72157600152782386 Or these from Indonesia, as well: http://www.flickr.com/photos/seanpaulkelley/6294361214/in/set-72157600152782386 Now the second one have soulless eyes, damn near evil!

[Ken Houghton]

All right, I give up: what do you have against grackles?

[Mark]

A huge flock of starlings used to roost at certain times of the year in a thicket near a mill in my hometown. I saw them a few times. I think the flock numbered well into the hundreds of thousands. I am relieved to say that they apparently decided to roost far enough away that they are no longer a local nuisance.

[John Krehbiel]

They are not native (in North America, anyway). That settles it for me.