I love starlings. They’re unappreciated merely because they’re so common, like onions and Coca-Cola (which would be very pricey if they were rare). They have gorgeous iridescent plumage, so admire it the next time you see one.
And they can also talk. From New Zealand News 3 comes a great 6.5-minute video of Buddy, a talking starling. (I can’t embed it, so go to the link.) And he speaks with a New Zealand accent!
Buddy was a rescue starling kept in captivity because of a mangled foot, and now has a new life teaching kindergartners to love each other. He’s the avian equivalent of Barney the Dinosaur, but infinitely more appealing. Go hear his message of amiability!
What’s amazing is how quickly he learns; apparently he can pick up a phrase or a song if he hears it only once.
h/t: Gayle
They are also unappreciated in the US because they are nonnative invasives.
Yes.
I’ve done public programs — both outside and indoors (attendance: 25-200 attendees.
And I’ve slipped in the opine that: Starlings are, ‘just like us; what’s not to relate to…’
As they are introduced(Americas, via The Mayflower & so forth); noisy; taking over the territories of the natives and/or species… sound like anybody we know??!!
MIRROR.
On the other hand, some fail to see the humor.
So … the Mayflower people weren’t preceded by Vikings, possibly Irish monks, and some Siberian proto-Inuit?
The mammoths, giant armadillos and innumerable other species thank you for your concern.
Humans, not just (WASP) Americans are invasive to the Americas.
“apparently he can pick up a phrase or a song if he hears it only once”
If that’s the case, I can’t help but wonder how the bird chooses which bits of sound are most interesting out of all the things it hears over the course of a day. Perhaps some insight could be gleaned into its psychology by analyzing them for patterns. (Although perhaps they just have a training ritual to make it learn to say particular things.)
I had a budgie that used to imitate the sound of fire engine sirens. He would never learn words we tried to teach him but sirens was what he liked.
I also have seen naughty blue jays making hawk screeches at my bird feeder, causing the birds to leave & leaving the seed bounty to the jays. I don’t know if this was on purpose or the jays just liked the sound. I’ve also heard a jay imitate the squeaky sound of a pulley for a clothes line.
Yes! A neighborhood mockingbird imitates the squeaky tin roof of my carport.(In central Texas.)
I LOVE starlings! I had one when I was a little girl. He was kicked out of his nest and we raised him and taught him how to eat bugs. Once, I interrupted him from his bug noms & he squawked at me angrily & bit me a good one on the cheek. I bet I picked him up just when he was about to pounce on a bug he had his eye on!
We taught him to fly by moving him up & down when he sat on our fingers. I still remember the strange looks I got from strangers when they saw me climb up on a fence & grab a hold of the starling (who I creatively named “Bird”).
Wild birds like starlings and robins (I raised a booted out of the nest one of those too) are very smart. They have a lot of built in instinct (my robin would crouch down & be quiet when we played a hawk sound) but they are quick learners too & they recognize their people.
I found Buddy’s voice a bit like a budgie voice – kind of raspy & whispery.
Mozart had a pet starling which he had for three years when, much to his sorrow, it died. They were introduced into New York in 1890 (200 of them) by a man trying to introduce all the birds mentioned by Shakespeare. Needless to say we are not overrun with skylarks, but there were considerably more than 200 starlings in my yard briefly this morning (in south central Iowa). They have done well in the United States by ousting other birds from their nesting habitats. When I was a student at Cornell many years ago I remember walking by an ivy covered carriage house and on cold nights the starlings trying to sleep in the ivy made just about the same sounds as I did cursing the cold and ice.
I love it when the starlings flock. I’ve had hundreds in my yard at a time & they get into the bare trees like little black leaves.
Wonderful! I had no idea that starlings could imitate human talk. I learn something every day!
Starlings can be beautifully iridescent in the spring, but I like their plumage best in early winter, when they are covered with dozens of light-colored “stars.”
Of course, I’d like them even better if they were a few orders of magnitude less common.
Many would consider the starling’s coat repellent, like a dirty oil slick in a puddle of water. But when they flock they perform spectacular syncopated displays. This seems to be the time of the year as several have noted.
I love watching them fly in their organized masses at sundown in the summer – at certain angles their plumage catches the sunlight and there is a sudden display and flash of gold in the sky.
O, what a darlin’ starlin’ !
I, too, had no knowledge o’ these ( local ) birds’ verbiage / diction faculty.
After Ms Bingham’s s o o o o buckin’ the odds from Buddy’s very beginnin’ and for her sake of a ( possibly lessened ) heartbreak, may Buddy enjoy a long, long life with her ‘nd the kiddos. Accent ‘nd all.
Blue
When I lived in the city, all I ever saw were sparrows. I never paid them any attention. But out here on the suburban fringe, I see them only rarely.
My beautiful wife loves them because they are rare, small, and ordinary looking. I think maybe she married me because I resemble one of her sparrows, otherwise I have no idea.
On the other hand, I love the yellow crested cockatoos, sleek wattle birds, yellow breasted robins, and multicoloured finches that fly in from the nearby mountain range.
Seems our tastes are complimentary.
Which would make the starling the Mozart of birds. Coincidentally, Mozart had a pet starling for three years, and there are quite a few web pages that discuss the story of Mozart’s starling. Here is one of them.
I’m sorry, but, the bird’s talents and benefits to children notwithstanding, I consider starlings to be “flying rats”- they are filthy birds, building their nests out of a mixture of twigs and their own excrement, and I’ve never dug out a nest of theirs yet that wasn’t lousy with mites. It took two attempts to establish them in this country, and now over two million of them nest on the Brooklyn bridge alone. They compete with native birds for food and any grain farmer would be glad to have someone come over and shoot a bunch of them. I saw an article in an early 1930s “Missouri Ruralist” newspaper where a farmer commented that he’d recently had a flock move in (they were just crossing the Mississippi at that time in their spread), but he was confident that he could eradicate them- Ha!. In the wild, I’ve never heard one make anything more than a croaking, gurgling squawk. They are smart, though; I’ll give them that- I shot one out of a flock once that was feasting on our chicken feed and after that, anytime I showed up with anything in my hand that vaguely resembled a rifle the flock was instantly gone and wouldn’t stop flying until they were a half mile away.
It all shows that its entirely about the memory in these birds. Animals have great memories even if they are dumb. Human speech is just segregated combinations of sounds and easily mimicked.It shows a creationist point about how the world is ordered by common laws and not the result of evolutionary happanchance.
Short lesson in evolution:
Randomness in gene mutations + natural selection (a so-called common law) = Evolution.
It’s not rocket surgery ya know.
Speaking of taming birds: it’s long been a dream of mine to convince a wild raven to be my best buddy. Two important factors contrary to this dream: ravens aren’t too common in built up areas, though we have lots of crows; and ravens, like crows, are extremely suspicious of pink apes.
The nearest I’ve come to fulfilling this dream was to feed cat chow to the crows from a bowl perched on a birdbath. They soon learned that the bowl had noms in it.
I think that ravens can be taught to talk too. In any case you will have to start with a raven chick.
I used to live in northern Arizona, and those huge birds were pretty common and accustomed to humans. Those are birds that seem to study you, like the velociraptors of the Jurassic Park movies.
Several species of the genus Corvus can imitate talk. For me, the myhahs are among the best, though, see
for example. 🙂
European Starlings (Sternus vulgaris) are a very aggressive invasive species. They drive out cavity nesting birds wherever they are found. They are probably the most numerous bird in North America. Their communal tree roosts -many in urban areas- are a noisy health hazard and make a stinking mess on the sidewalk below.
On a more positive note, flocks in flight are an amazing sight (Youtube)
They seem much less common than they were in the UK now.
I have a stuffed one by my bed – I got it when I was about 7!
Seems they’ve moved to north america…
Several years ago a coworker brought me a baby starling that fell from a high nest inside our warehouse. He was injured by the fall, and one leg was gimp. I brought him home and fed him with a mixture of ground dry d*g food and sausage made into a damp mixture, and presented to him on the end of a round toothpick (the kind with a sharp point on each end). Once the hungry little bastard grabbed the whole toothpick and completely swallowed it. I figured that would kill him for sure. I couldn’t see it to pull it out, so I just closed the door and left him alone to die. But the next morning, there was the toothpick somehow regurgitated and lying on the floor, and the baby bird was whining to be fed again. After several weeks of hell spent feeding him and listening to him squawk, I decided to get rid of him (he had feathers by then, and would fly and land on my chest to bitch for food right in my face). I didn’t know how to teach him how to fly, but it turned out I didn’t have to. I carried him out on the back deck and as soon as I opened my hands he was gone, and then he executed a perfect right angle turn between two houses with no flying lessens at all. Oh, and as he left my hands he shot a huge load of liquid bird shit all over my shirt. That’s starling gratitude for you.
Two weeks later I saw a flock of a couple of dozen fledgling starlings feeding on a lawn about two blocks away. One of them hopped with a limp. I can’t prove it, but I just know it was him.
Reminds me of raising kids!
“And he speaks with a New Zealand accent!”
Did you mean “And he speaks with a Kiwi accent!”