Starling murmurations rewrite the sky with borrowed sounds
Sturnidae packs 128 species in 36 genera of glossy, often iridescent passerines famous for mimicry and swarming murmurations. Strong fliers of open country, they probe for grubs, nest in holes with blue or white eggs, and range from Arctic edges to the equator—though not native to the Americas.
A murmuration has no leader. The ornithologist Edmund Selous once suggested the birds shared thoughts, but by 2013 physicists in Italy and engineers at Princeton showed with computer models that each starling tracks just its seven nearest neighbours, matching attraction, repulsion and heading. Those overlapping groups pass changes of direction through flocks of more than a thousand birds, and the sudden swirls and dives may confuse falcons. The word itself comes from the low murmur of so many wings, and winter roosts can hold thousands.
Starlings are also gifted mimics. They borrow sounds from their surroundings, including car alarms and human speech, keep a repertoire of around 15 to 20 imitations of other birds, favour simple, common calls, and develop local dialects. They can recognise individuals by voice, which has made them subjects in research on the evolution of language. When foraging, many use open-bill probing, driving the closed bill into soil and prying it open to expose grubs, a move known by the German word zirkeln, after a pair of compasses.
The family Sturnidae, 128 species in 36 genera, ranges from Kenrick's starling at 15 centimetres to the Nias hill myna at up to 36. Their glossy sheen is structural colour from feather architecture rather than pigment, and only 25 species differ by sex in plumage. In Asia most species live in evergreen forest, while in Africa most prefer open woodland and savannah; Europe has just three. Shelley's starling breeds in Ethiopia and Somaliland and winters in Kenya and Tanzania.
Acclimatisation societies released European starlings in North America from the 1870s to the 1890s, including in Central Park in 1890, though the tale that this was to import Shakespeare's birds is largely fiction.
Source: Starling
