It is quite unnecessary for me to describe the appearance of the Starling, for the species is so common, sociable, and unlike every other feathered friend in this country that confusion is almost impossible.
I love the brave, bustling bird, for when it has any work to do it does not go dawdling along like a lazy boy crawling halfheartedly to school, but rushes about as if the welfare of the whole universe depended upon its individual exertions.
It is a lively singer, with almost unrivalled powers of imitation, and has, I must confess, completely deceived me on several occasions. One fine spring morning, whilst on my way to a railway station in the north of London, I heard, to my surprise, the familiar notes of a Golden Plover, and immediately began to examine the heavens for a member of that species flying overhead. To my surprise, I discovered that the sounds were coming from a Starling delightedly flapping its wings on a chimney-pot not far away. On another occasion, whilst hunting for a much-desired Sandpiper’s nest on the shores of a small loch in the Outer Hebrides, I said to my brother, “Hark! I hear one calling!” But that Sandpiper proved to be a Starling standing on a rock not far off imitating to perfection the soft call notes of the little wader. I have heard different members of this species mimicking the cries and call notes of the Curlew, Whimbrel, Lapwing, Common Partridge, Redshank, Ringed Plover, House Sparrow, and other small birds.
Tame Starlings have been taught to imitate the human voice so well that one has been said to repeat the Lord’s Prayer from beginning to end, and Pliny, the historian, mentions one that was able to speak in both Greek and Latin.
The harsh alarm cry of the species sounds something like the word spate, spate.
YOUNG STARLING IN ITS FIRST COAT OF FEATHERS
Although sometimes guilty, especially during very dry seasons, of taking cherries and other fruit, the damage wrought in this way is as nothing compared with the vast amount of good done by this species in the destruction of insects injurious to growing crops. It is an amusing sight to watch a flock hurrying and scurrying across a field, the hindmost members continually flying over the foremost and then running in breathless haste looking eagerly this way and that, probing every likely and unlikely place for some lurking grub, as if life did not contain one moment to be wasted.
They alight on the backs of sheep and cattle in order to destroy troublesome parasites, and at certain seasons of the year may be seen dexterously hawking winged insects over houses and tree-tops.