Nifty Multifaceted Starlings

There was a good half-dozen of them sitting along the roof ridge-line as I drove up the drive, all of them apparently deep in a serious family conference.

They were dressed in gun-barrel blue with shots of dark green if they turned in the right light, and they had fine contrasting off-white polka-dots on their waist-coats. Typical of starlings, they were strutting and stomping about on my roof with a self-important proprietary air that nearly made me feel like an intruder.

But believe you me, this house is mine – subject always, of course, to the approval of the bank manager’s liver. 

Inevitably, living outside the confines of suburbia, we were required to share our home with a variety of other self-invited personnel – magpies, weta, hedgehogs, various rodents (rabbits, rats, mice), a beautiful fat kereru recently, and a tui who spent several tuneful days sucking sweetness from the red-hot poker plants across the front lawn.

When I arrived home, the starlings languidly wheeled away from the roof as I parked on the forecourt, some hurling themselves into the long, downhill glide towards the neighbour’s paddocks, while a couple of others swung up to the top branches of the elms so they could keep on eye on proceedings.

They chatted in the wire-twang language starlings use when they’re untroubled, jumping from perch to perch, and I deliberately took my time getting out of the vehicle, collecting my bits and pieces, and making my way inside. Inevitably, they stayed sitting high up, watching for sudden, unexpected events.

I obliged by noisily opening the garage door in anticipation of Herself arriving home shortly.

The starlings fled.

But they – or their whanau – were back again within minutes, this time with beaks crammed with grubs, worms and other succulent offerings for an insatiable brood of youngsters secreted in the ceiling of our garage.

No matter how many yards of chicken netting I plug along the guttering and elsewhere on this section of roof, these dratted birds somehow punch a hole through the battlements and continue to hatch nesting after nesting as year follows year.

Sadly, I had had to whack a pair which had decided – despite may best, prolonged efforts to dissuade them – that they wanted to nest in the engine of my truck.

From dawn to 7am, when I was ready to go to work, they had, each morning, hauled half a bucket of straw, twigs, leaves, lolly-papers and other fancy DIY home-building material up into a space beside the battery, snug against the motor, presenting me with a bundle of ideal engine-fire material.

Despite the sudden demise of two of their number the rest of the family continued to hold regular groupie meetings on the roof, in between endless gliding flights out into the paddocks for tucker that youngsters raucously demand.

I read somewhere that adult starlings can and regularly do eat up to seven times their own body weight in grubs, crickets, spiders and other culinary delights each day. Which inevitably leads to a remarkably high volume of waste-disposal at the other end of the bird on a very frequent basis. 

With the huge volumes of food being brought to the nestlings, nests would soon turn into a chin-high morass of excrement if it wasn’t regularly gotten rid of, and, like most other birds, starlings are very efficient at waste disposal.

Watch a pair feeding their youngsters, and you’ll see that whenever they deliver food, they exit the nest with a white sack hanging from their beak.

It’s a neatly self-contained bag of pooh from one or other chick, which the parent bird picks up and carries away.

And it’s as well to study the flight paths of the adults when they leave the nest – these aerial bog-bombs are usually dropped after the first 10 to 20 metres of flight from the nest-site, and if the family car or week’s washing is on the bombing run, some very unpleasant yelling can ensue.

They’re a smart bird, the starling, first introduced into New Zealand from Europe in 1862, and since then they have spread right throughout the country. There’s some degree of controversy about them, especially among farmers where the birds are either loved or hated.

They’re loved because they eat huge quantities of grass grubs and other crop-munching bugs; they’re hated because they nest in sheds, farm vehicles, pump-houses and other places, creating an unholy mess with scattered straw and twigs all over the floor and often creating fire hazards.

At certain times of the year they can also be seen in massive flocks, sometimes thousands of birds, wheeling and weaving through the sky, and occasionally mobbing a hawk.

They’re fascinating to watch on a clear still evening, just after sunset, when the sky is all washed out and the birds stand out in stark contrast. Their sudden sweeping, whirling mass turns are unbelievably precise, the hundreds of birds all making the massive swings at exactly the same time. I’ve never seen two birds collide.

Now and then they select one or several large trees in which to roost, such as the poplars on State Highway One outside the big Fonterra factory near Horotiu, and within days the trees and their foliage will take on a grayish glazed appearance, as though they’ve been spray-painted. In effect they have been – by thousands of indiscriminate fecal dumpings by the birds.

Beneath the trees is not a good place for either a car park or a family picnic. Maybe it’s why the taxonomic name for the starling is Sturnus vulgaris.

They’re a very alert bird, always on the lookout for danger, and bursting away with a brief chittering alarm call when disturbed. The starling is also a remarkably good mimic, and can sometimes be heard imitating the calls of other birds, especially pukeko. They have even been known to call like a Californian quail, and also the fantail.

Their own language seems varied and broad, ranging from a series of drawn-out, descending whistles to chuckles and warbles. It seems that a fair portion of their language is also beyond human hearing – if you watch closely you’ll frequently see the birds gabbling away with beaks wide open, yet no sound can be heard. The range is way above what we can catch. 

And the birds really like running noisily about on iron roofs early in the mornings, usually wearing what sounds like heavy, metal-soled boots.

Over the summer months, there will be a procession of fledged youngsters running about the lawn, whinging and grizzling behind their parents as they wait to be fed, and gradually getting the idea that they can forage and feed themselves.

It’s not until the autumn, when the young are full-grown, that the big flocks assemble and begin their spectacular synchronized sky-dancing.

I still can’t quite make up my mind whether I like them or not. 

But they’re definitely there, and they certainly provide a good deal of added interest and variety to life in the country.

Kingsley is a columnist with the Waikato Times in Hamilton. His Outdoors columns appear fortnightly, and late last year he published a selected 25 columns in book form. A second book has now been published. Kingsley can be contacted at kingsley(at)accuwrite.co.nz

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