Monday 10 November 2014

Close Encounter with a Starling

Day 9

Hey guys today's Day 9 but before we get to today's subject I want to thank all of you that are reading this blog as you have helped me reach 500 page views. I think it's a tremendous achievement seeing as I have only been going for 8 days. Any way today's subject is again about starlings. You may think I have an obsession about them but I don't -  I just like to watch them. I have a bird feeder stuck to one of my windows which lets birds get extremely close to us in the house. It was really incredible as we put it up in the morning and by the time I got back from school my mum told me that there had been loads of birds on the feeder and there had been so many starlings that the food had all gone.We were all very impressed by this because normally when you put up a new feeder it takes a while for the birds to trust it. Because of this in a few days I will post an experiment in which I will put up a new bird feeder and see how long it takes them to get used to it. Any way here is the picture of the starling.
Starling (Sturnus vulgaris) on window feeder

I do find starlings very interesting as they do things called murmurations. These are spectacular shows of potentially up to tens of thousands of starlings flying around the sky and making fabulous art work. We have seen one but didn't manage to get any pictures though if you do want to see one go to this website, type in starling and watch the automatic slideshow at the top of the page. 


I really enjoyed seeing the coverage on Autumwatch Extra of the murmurations at Leighton Moss by Richard Taylor-Jones.

Here is a couple of facts about starlings:

Starlings are actually a red status and I think that is because of the decline of farm land and us building things on it. This decreases starling nesting areas although starlings do nest in cities.

One real reason of this is that everywhere else in the world is having large declines of these birds but don't worry if you live in England as they are not going anywhere because they spend all year round here. Bad news for highland Scotland as they only visit in Summer so try and get out to see these amazing brown birds. 

For more information go to this link

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