Starlings: Balletic Dancers of the Skies by John Greeves Attitudes to the Common Starling (Sturnus Vulgarus) is a little bit like Marmite, you either love it or hate it. Those in favour of starlings will see them as sociable and gregarious birds, tenacious and adaptable especially when it comes to urban living. They will quickly point out the benefits they bring to both forestry and agriculture by eating a vast number of invertebrates, many of which are pests. Others, will be less generous disposed, citing them as quarrelsome, vociferous and a general nuisance. It won’t take them long before they talk about the damage they cause to soft fruits like cherries and the food they consume, which was intended for domestic live-stock. Some gardeners, will see starlings as the aggressive scourge of the bird table, arriving in flocks, mob-handling other smaller birds, before cleaning out the feeding station and flying on.
Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Liverpool. Edinburgh, Glasgow and Belfast. Sadly those numbers have declined dramatically by 80 % in recent years. Today their numbers are estimated at 1.8 million birds and this staggering decline has now placed them on the critical red list of UK birds. The blunt truth is that between 1995 and 2016 alone, Britain’s breeding population of Common Starlings crashed by a staggering 51%. In the past 1/3 of juveniles used to survive in the first year, that number has dropped alarmingly now to 15%. The British Trust for Ornithology found that although most broods hatched successfully, the real problem occurred away from the nest. Loss of pasture land, farm chemicals and decline of soil invertebrates like earthworms and leatherjackets have all been blamed, but the major cause for this decline still remains unknown.
Whatever your views,(and starlings have to live as well), these birds have amazing adaptability, enabling them to exploit food sources found on farmland, sea shores, moorlands, rubbish tips, sewage farms, suburban gardens and even city centres. As tree hole nesters they have adapted very well to urban living by exploiting any hole with a suitable interior cavity found on a man made structure. Our homes have not escaped their attention, and these noisy opportunists have sought out dryer and bathroom vents, vacant roof-spaces or cavities in our homes to take up residency as our uninvited guests. At one time an estimated 37 million starlings lived in the UK with huge flocks once gathering over
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