Starlings: Wakey, wakey!
Have you got starlings nesting in your roof?
If the answer is 'yes', no doubt you will be cursing every morning when the youngsters wake up and demand to be fed.
Adult starlings spend three weeks looking for leatherjackets and other grubs to take back to their nests – from five in the morning until nine at night.
However, by the end of the month, the youngsters will have left your roof and will be chasing after their parents, still noisily begging for food.
We often see families of starlings on the grass outside The Nunnery or on the playing fields next to Barnham Cross Common.
Youngsters are easy to distinguish from their parents in the first few weeks of life, as they leave the nest with a grey-brown plumage, moulting into the glossy oil-black feathers with white tips during the course of the late summer.
It may seem very wasteful to have one set of feathers which last for less than three months but this is quite normal for most of the birds we see in our gardens.
Young birds are very vulnerable while in the nest and the main aim is to get out as quickly as possible. Their early feathers are quite fluffy and there are areas, for instance under the wing, where no feathers grow at all.
Once the immediate pressure to leave the nest has passed, juvenile starlings soon start to grow a complete new set of feathers that will last a further 12 months.
Starlings are not necessarily popular, despite the fact that they consume large numbers of grubs that eat the grass roots of our lawns.
If they were rare, we would think that they were wonderful, resplendent in glossy plumage that catches the sun and shines purple and green.
They are clever, too, with the ability to mimic a whole range of other bird species, from buzzards and owls through to thrushes and chickens, the ring tones of phones, croaking frogs, farm animals and even the human voice.
Each individual male develops his own range of up to 30 calls, phrases and snippets of song, which he runs together apparently randomly and for minutes on end.
For conservationists, starlings are important birds, having declined by more than 50 per cent in the last 30 years. This qualifies them for the red list of birds of conservation concern, along with species such as bittern and grey partridge.
Even in our gardens, the starling is becoming scarcer. Results from more than 2,000 people in East Anglia who belong to the BTO/CJ Garden BirdWatch scheme show that starlings are disappearing from more and more of our gardens each year.
Perhaps they will soon be rare enough for us to appreciate them properly and to forgive them for waking us up so early.
Graham Appleton is from the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), which has its based in Thetford. Learn more about the work of the BTO at www.bto.org
Email to a friend
Print this page
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Bury St Edmunds
Wednesday 08 February 2012
Today
Light snow
Temperature: -3 C to 0 C
Wind Speed: 16 mph
Wind direction: North east
Tomorrow
Cloudy
Temperature: -1 C to 1 C
Wind Speed: 5 mph
Wind direction: North
