European Starling (Sturnus vulgaris): Facts and Murmurations

What does a starling look like?

From a distance a starling looks black, but in good light its plumage shines with iridescent purple and green. It has a short square tail, pointed triangular wings and a long, sharp, pointed bill. On the ground it walks and runs rather than hopping, with a busy, waddling gait.

Starlings change their look through the year without a second molt. After their single annual molt in late summer, the fresh feathers have white or buff tips, so in autumn and winter the bird is covered in pale spots. Through the winter these tips wear away, and by spring the starling is glossy and only lightly spotted.

The bill changes too: dark brownish-black in winter and bright yellow in the breeding season. A breeding male has a blue-gray base to the lower bill, while a female’s is pinkish. Juveniles are plain gray-brown with a dark bill, and in late summer young birds molting into adult plumage look patchy, with brown heads and spotted bodies.

How big is a starling?

A starling is a little smaller than a blackbird or an American robin and has a noticeably shorter tail. In flight its short tail and pointed, triangular wings give it a distinctive arrowhead shape, quite different from the rounder wings of a thrush.

How to tell a starling from similar birds

Starlings are often confused with other dark birds, especially in North America.

• Common blackbird (Europe): larger, with a long tail, all-black plumage without gloss or spots in males, and an orange-yellow bill and eye-ring. Blackbirds hop; starlings walk.
• Spotless starling (Iberia, southern France and northwest Africa): a very close relative that looks almost identical in summer, but is darker and duller, with almost no spots in winter.
• Common grackle (North America): bigger and lankier, with a long, keel-shaped tail and pale yellow eyes.
• Brown-headed cowbird and red-winged blackbird (North America): both have thick, finch-like bills rather than the starling’s long, sharp bill, and much longer tails. Male red-winged blackbirds also show bright red shoulder patches.

The starling’s short tail, pointed wings, glossy speckled plumage and confident walking gait are the best clues. Its constant chattering, clicking and whistling from rooftops and TV aerials is another giveaway.

Habitat and range

The starling’s native range runs from Iceland, Britain and Iberia across Europe to western Mongolia, south to North Africa and the Middle East, with some birds wintering as far as northern India. Birds in western and southern Europe are mostly resident, while those from Scandinavia, Russia and eastern Europe migrate south and west for the winter, swelling flocks in Britain, France and Spain.

People have introduced starlings to many other countries, mostly in the 19th century. They became established in North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and several Pacific and Caribbean islands, and more recently in Argentina. The world population was estimated at more than 310 million birds in the early 2000s. The story of the American introduction is told in how did starlings get to America?.

Starlings prefer open ground with short grass for feeding, such as pastures, lawns, playing fields and airfields, with holes in trees or buildings nearby for nesting. They thrive in towns and farmland but avoid dense forest.

Most starlings in Britain and western Europe stay put all year, but in October and November their numbers swell as millions of birds arrive from the Baltic states, Scandinavia, Poland and Russia. Ringing has shown that starlings hatched in England have been found in later years as far away as Norway, Finland and Russia. The visitors leave again in March and April, when the huge winter roosts break up.

What do starlings eat?

Starlings are omnivores. In spring and summer they eat mainly invertebrates, especially insect larvae in the soil such as leatherjackets (crane fly larvae) and beetle grubs, as well as earthworms, spiders, caterpillars and flying insects. In autumn and winter they add fruit, berries, seeds, grain and food scraps.

Their special feeding trick is called open-bill probing. A starling pushes its closed bill into the soil, then forces it open to make a hole and peers down the gap. Its skull and jaw muscles are adapted for this, and its eyes can swivel forward to look along the bill. Flocks often feed across a field in a rolling wave, with birds at the back flying over to the front.

Behavior, song and mimicry

Starlings are highly social. They feed, bathe and roost in groups, and in autumn and winter thousands gather to roost in reedbeds, woods, piers and city buildings. Before settling, the flocks may perform murmurations, swirling in shifting shapes in the sky. Find out why in why do starlings murmurate?.

The starling’s song is a long, rambling mix of whistles, clicks, rattles and warbles. Woven into it are imitations of other birds, such as curlews, buzzards and blackbirds, and of other sounds, including car alarms, phone tones and squeaking gates. Males with longer songs and larger repertoires tend to attract mates earlier. Captive starlings can even learn human words, a talent noted by Pliny the Elder and by Shakespeare, and Mozart kept a pet starling for three years from 1784. Read more about bird mimics in which birds can talk?.

Nesting and life cycle

Starlings nest in holes: tree cavities, old woodpecker holes, gaps under roof tiles, walls and nest boxes. The male claims a hole, starts building and sings near it to attract a female. He often decorates the nest with fresh green leaves and aromatic herbs such as yarrow, which may help deter parasites and impress females.

The female lays four or five glossy, pale blue eggs, and both parents incubate them for about 12–13 days. The chicks are fed mainly on insect larvae and leave the nest at about three weeks old. Many pairs raise one brood a year in northern Europe and two in the south, and fledglings soon gather in noisy juvenile flocks.

Most starlings live only two or three years. Many young birds die in their first year, but adults survive better, and the oldest ringed starling in Britain lived 17 years and 7 months. Predators include peregrine falcons, sparrowhawks, merlins, owls and domestic cats.

Myths and facts

Myth: starlings are a kind of blackbird. In North America starlings are often lumped together with grackles, cowbirds and red-winged blackbirds as “blackbirds”, and they feed and roost alongside them in winter. In fact they belong to a different family, the Sturnidae, related to the mynas of Asia and the glossy starlings of Africa.

Myth: all the starlings in America came from Shakespeare fans. Starlings were released in Central Park in 1890 and 1891, but the popular claim that the aim was to bring every bird in Shakespeare’s plays to America only appeared in print decades later and is not supported by records from the time.

Fact: starlings can stop a clock. In 1949 so many starlings perched on the minute hand of Big Ben in London that the clock was delayed. Huge winter roosts in city centers have caused problems with noise and droppings for well over a century.

Conservation status

Worldwide the starling is listed as Least Concern by the IUCN because its population is huge. However, the trend is downward, and declines have been severe in northern Europe since the 1980s. In the UK, numbers fell by more than 80 percent between 1966 and 2004, and the starling is on the UK Red List of birds of conservation concern. The main cause is thought to be low survival of young birds, linked to intensive farming and the loss of permanent grassland rich in soil insects.

Even in North America, where it is invasive, the starling has declined since the 1960s, according to Breeding Bird Survey data, though it still numbers in the tens of millions.

Starlings and people

Starlings have a mixed reputation. In Europe they are valued for eating crop pests such as leatherjackets and wireworms, and in the former Soviet Union millions of nest boxes were put up for them. Their murmurations draw crowds of watchers every winter.

Where they have been introduced, starlings are serious invaders. They take over nest holes needed by native birds, including bluebirds, woodpeckers, purple martins and, in Australia, parrots, and they damage fruit, grain and livestock feed. The species is on the IUCN’s list of 100 of the world’s worst invasive alien species. In North America it is not protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, unlike almost all native songbirds. Other invasive introduced birds include the house sparrow, and one of the starling’s most effective natural predators is the peregrine falcon.