European starlings probing a parking lot for protein. During the spring mating and nesting season, starlings hunt for invertebrates. They jab their yellow beaks into the soil and power them open like a post-hole digger, opposite of most birds’ and animals’ jaw muscles, which clamp their mouths shut. Then they slide their eyes forward to peer into the dark hole for prey. Photo by Sarah Walker.

The bird I am most likely to see and hear in Moscow during Spring is the European starling – not on my feeders, but waddling across bright green lawns, usually in pairs or small groups. They’re hunting invertebrates in the soil, using their “backwards jaws” to great advantage (see photo caption). Starlings consume a lot of cutworms, which is appreciated by gardeners who freak out when they find their tiny seedlings munched off at the ground.

Mozart appreciated starlings too. In 1874 he bought one at a pet store when he heard it whistling part of his Piano Concerto No. 17 in G Major.

Then there’s Eugene Schiefflin of New York City. In 1890 he bought 100 starlings from England to release in Central Park because he wanted to populate the New World with all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays. Only his starlings survived, and famously so: in 50 years this European bird had spread to the West Coast, thriving wherever humans put up buildings and farmed crops.

The first known occurrence of starlings in Idaho was reported by University of Idaho grad student Clarence Olsen in 1941 when he noted a single bird east of Moscow (as reported by Victor Jones in the journal Condor, May 1946). Today, North America is home to 200,000,000 starlings. They are despised for out-competing native birds for nesting sites, spreading disease, stealing livestock feed and soiling vast areas. None of the many inventions to get rid of them, including “Starlicide,” has worked. They’re here to stay, and what’s to stop them from reaching 300,000,000? Then there would be one of them for every one of us.

Starlings are robin-sized. In winter their beaks are dark and their feathers are tipped with white, like tiny stars, hence their name. By spring the tips wear off revealing the purple and green colors of mating season – iridescent and a little oily-looking. Their beaks turn bright yellow.

Starlings are chunky birds with short tails. In flight their wings look triangular. Blackbirds are slimmer and have longer tails.

I hear them everywhere in Moscow. While out hunting the lawns they chuckle and click; when perched in trees they tinkle. They are clever mimics. I’ve caught them doing killdeer and California quail. Moscow Ornithologist Ashley Martens says she’s surprised to hear them imitate red-tailed hawks, “a skill I thought was reserved for Steller’s jays!”

Starlings nest in hollow trees, old woodpecker holes, nestboxes, a hole in your eaves… The trouble is they chase away other cavity nesters like bluebirds, woodpeckers, swallows or wrens. Ashley is noticing more starlings outside of town, moving toward the forest edge. In town, Moscow birder Charles Swift says starlings probably out-compete violet-green swallows for nest cavities. He’s seen starlings nesting in streetlights!

When they’re not breeding and raising their multiple broods, starlings switch to a grain, fruit and garbage diet. In fall and winter they gather in large flocks, like the lines of birds that cover the power lines near the mall. Charles notes very large winter flocks by the sewage treatment plant and the University barns.

Terry Tempest Williams wrote about starlings in her book, Refuge. She describes being at the Salt Lake City dump during a Christmas Bird Count, sitting on a hefty bag, among swarms of gulls and starlings gorging on garbage. Starlings are like us, she despairs: aggressive, greedy, cruel, and there are lots of them. Taking over the world. And while we loathe them and invent ways to get rid of them, we simultaneously encourage them “as we systematically erase the specialized habitats of specialized birds.”

When the mobs of dump starlings take flight, “The symmetry of starling flocks takes my breath away; I lose track of time and space….They wheel and turn, twist and glide, with no apparent leader.” When a peregrine falcon dives at them, the flock “pulls together like a winced eye, then opens in an explosion of feathers.”

Every April in Denmark tourists flock to Jutland Marsh for the Black Sun Phenomenon – over a million starlings in flight, said to cloud the sun. See the images at the EPOD website by entering “black sun denmark” in Google. I was awestruck.

What to say about starlings? It’s not PC to like them. It’s preachy to belabor how their success syncs with our own habitat-taking, food-wasting, land-sprawling habits; snide to say You can’t blame them for being successful. Terry Tempest Williams concludes, “Perhaps the only value in the multitudes of starlings we have garnished is that in some small way they allow us to comprehend what vast flocks of birds must have felt like.”

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