Invasion

A "Nature Notes" article . . .

We have suffered an invasion! We don’t normally get starlings in our garden. They sometimes feature on our record sheet, because they do live not far away, and from time to time we see them from the garden, flying by or perching on nearby roofs or chimney pots. But our garden is - or was - starling free. And then, all of a sudden, the other day, it was full of them: an invasion.

A family of starlings had winged in, father, mother and seven or eight boisterous youngsters, to raid the fat and insect chunks we have in one of our feeders.  I suppose the parents were introducing their young charges to good sources of food. Clearly they like the fat chunks, as they’ve stayed with us ever since - not the whole family, thank goodness, but one or two of the youngsters.

Actually, it was quite entertaining to watch them. The young birds were as big and as strong as the parents. They are a mousy brown in colour, and will gradually develop the spotty black adult winter plumage over coming months. They are acrobatic, noisy and quarrelsome, rowdy yobbos of the bird world. The parents clearly struggle to cope with them. The young birds are perfectly able to feed themselves, but still chase after their parents in the hope that they will feed them. This means the parents we saw were constantly under attack; though they’d clearly decided that by bringing their children to feast at our feeders they’d done their bit, they were repeatedly mobbed, attacked and - let’s be honest - mugged by the young ones.

The parents in summer plumage are very handsome birds, with yellow bills, black plumage that is iridescent, and shot with purple and green, an upright stance and a strutting, swaggering style. They are so rowdy at a feeding station that other birds can be put off, though that didn’t seem to be the case on our invasion day, and the tits and finches just flitted in between quite happily, while our boss robin showed himself easily a match for a young starling.

Starlings are present all the year round in every part of the UK. While their numbers have fallen in recent years, they are by no means rare, and in winter millions of starlings from the Continent flood in to take advantage of our comparatively mild winter weather. As insect eaters they can be very useful, feasting on a number of pest species like wireworms and leatherjackets, probing into soft ground with their long bills. However, they are generalist feeders that will exploit any likely food source, and if present in large numbers they can do serious damage to crops.

Starlings are familiar city birds, congregating on ledges and windowsills; in rural areas they are often hole-nesters. The huge winter gatherings of starlings, called murmurations, generally in marshy areas, are one of our most amazing wildlife sights. The wheeling flight of many thousands of birds is more reminiscent of waders than of other song birds, I always think.