All the world’s a stage in the avian world and when it comes to a global performer the starling tops the bill.
Although originating in Europe, starlings introduced by European colonisers have spread across the world, where in a never-ending drama between good and evil it has certainly become the villain.
It raids crops, spreads disease and makes its home in the most disruptive and destructive of places.
Not a week goes by during the spring and summer months when I don’t hear of Hobart residents battling with noisy and messy starlings who have made nests under eaves, in gutters and drainage pipes.
The latest was a query from a couple in Kingston who asked what bird had piled a mountain of nesting material in an aperture and kept returning with more litter every time it was cleaned.
They had identified this all-black bird as either a starling or blackbird. It was easy to determine the culprit without even seeing this potential nest site. I learned as a schoolboy birder in Britain that starlings nest in cavities and blackbirds build cup-shaped structures from mud and grass in bushes.
I’ve never been a fan of starlings, either in their traditional home or in all the countries they have colonised.
Another early lesson in bird study was to learn that starlings were the bird of spring in Russia, arriving there after spending the harsh Russian winter in Britain.
In those days of the cold war, I thought it appropriate that what I considered a grubby, nondescript bird should be a totem of the grim Soviet Union.
I’ve mellowed a little since leaving England. Not all starlings depart Britain in summer and when I visit there I enjoy watching the species in London parks. And in winter their plumage is dotted with little white spots, a feature that gives the starling its common name, the spots resembling stars in a midnight-blue sky.
But it doesn’t excuse the harm they do in countries where they have been introduced.
In Australia they do immeasurable damage to crops, even if insects and grubs form a large part of their diet. They also compete with cavity-nesting species like parrots for nesting holes. I’ve witnessed starlings taking over nesting boxes intended for endangered swift parrots.
It is the same in North America. There they steal the nests of woodpeckers. In New York’s Central Park I have also seen an example of starling aggressiveness in the New World – a woodpecker called a flicker being hauled from its nesting hole by a mob of starlings.
Ironically, the Shakespearean reference to all the world being a stage is appropriate for starlings in America. The invasive species was introduced there by a well-meaning lover of Shakespeare’s plays who wanted all the birds mentioned in the Bard’s works to be seen in the US.