March 2022
Not everyone seems to like starlings – they have a bit of a reputation as the bully boys of the bird feeder, but they are truly remarkable and need all the help they can get. Anyone who has seen the vast flocks passing through the village may be surprised to hear that the UK starling population has fallen by more than 80% in recent years, meaning they are now on the critical list of birds most at risk. The decline is due to the loss of permanent pasture, increased use of farm chemicals and a shortage of food and nesting sites.
As well as raiding bird tables, starlings also eat invertebrates, particularly leatherjackets (crane fly larvae) – they probe for food with open bills, creating a small hole in the ground that they can see into very clearly with their low-light vision, enabling them to identify their prey. You may see them busy doing this on your garden lawn.
This time of year I often watch them feeding frantically in the churchyard - while a part of me worries they are going to consume the site completely, it is also gratifying to think that at least there is plenty of food for them to take, and it is evidence of how much richer the churchyard is now than it was even 5 years ago when I didn’t have this feasting to observe out of the window while sipping my morning tea.
The reason of course we see so many starlings here in the village, apart from the fine dining opportunities, is due to being on the flightpath to their roosting grounds at Davidstow. This is one of the best sites in the country for watching murmurations – the amazing acrobatic displays that starlings perform at dusk. Resident numbers are boosted by others from Northern Europe who arrive in the autumn and stay until spring, making the most of our milder winters. They spend the day spread out over the countryside in smaller flocks, coming together in vast swarms above their roosting grounds, sometimes numbering hundreds of thousands of individual birds.
Murmuration photos by (top) Pete Hicks and (bottom) Mark Yeomans
We don’t know for sure why they perform these incredible displays, wheeling and turning in unison, coming together in astonishing patterns, and we still aren’t completely sure how they avoid bumping into each other! It seems that part of it is safety in numbers, and partly it’s a form of communication, but really it remains a mystery. While they are airborne all you can hear is the beat of wings (hence murmuration), but suddenly a signal is sent out and the birds will descend, chattering loudly to each other, as they find their roost for the night and silence then falls together with the darkness.
Photos by Lisa Baker-Pannell
We can help them continue this magical dance by allowing them to use our bird tables, and by not using chemicals on our lawns. They may have voracious appetites but they help our gardens by eating plant predators and are also important pollinators as they move from fruit tree and berry bush. The season for starlings being so gregarious is actually quite short, and if it seems like there’s a lot of them it is because they synchronise their egg laying so all the young are born at the same time. Most of the things we can do to help starlings will benefit all our birds in the long run – if you want to ensure other visitors to your feeders get a look-in, make sure you have a good variety of food including niger seed and peanuts, which are less likely to be eaten by starlings.
DID YOU KNOW? Starlings are excellent mimics and will often reproduce the sounds they hear, including lawnmowers, mobile phones and cement mixers!
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