All species › Passerines › Starlings › Common Starling
Common Starling | Sturnus vulgaris
Spreeuw | Estornino pinto
In this region the Common Starling is mainly a winter visitor from Europe and western Asia. Huge numbers winter in the olive groves of the Maghreb, in the Nile Delta and in the northern Levant and Iraq, streaming to their roosts at dusk in undulating flocks.
Voice
The song is a long, chattering medley of whistles, clicks, rattles and imitations of other birds and sounds, also heard in winter at roosts. Calls include a harsh shreeh and in flight a short prruut; the alarm is a dry kyett.
Recording: Uku Paal — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
19–22 cm. Stocky, with a short tail, a pointed bill and triangular wings. In fresh winter plumage black with a green and purple gloss, densely spotted white and buff, with buff-fringed wing and tail feathers and a dark bill. By spring the spots wear off, the plumage becomes glossier and the bill turns yellow (with a blue-grey base in the male and a pink base in the female). Juveniles are uniform grey-brown with a paler throat and a dark bill. Walks quickly with a waddling gait; flight fast and direct, alternating flapping and gliding.
Confusion species
Spotless Starling (Sturnus unicolor), a resident in the Maghreb, is darker and more uniform in all plumages, with at most very fine spots, a purple gloss without green and long throat feathers. Juvenile Rosy Starlings (Pastor roseus) are pale sandy brown, with a yellowish bill, a paler rump and pale-fringed wings. Common Myna (Acridotheres tristis) is brown with a black head, a yellow eye patch and a white wing patch.
Habitat
In winter mainly olive groves, date-palm groves and other orchards, fields, pastures and rubbish dumps, but also town parks. Roosts communally in reedbeds, lines of trees, palms and street trees, sometimes in hundreds of thousands. In winter it eats mainly olives, dates and other fruit, and invertebrates from the soil.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the habitats of North Africa and the Middle East.
Range and movements
Abundant winter visitor to northern Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia (with large numbers in the olive groves around Sousse and Sfax), to north-west Libya and to the Nile Delta and Nile Valley in Egypt. In the Middle East abundant in Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Iraq, and common in Kuwait and northern and eastern Saudi Arabia; further south, in Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE and northern Oman, scarce, and in Yemen rare. As a breeding bird in the region at most rare and irregular. Beyond the region it breeds in Europe and western and central Asia to Lake Baikal; introduced to North America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand among others.
- Resident
- Summer visitor (c. Apr–Sep)
- Winter visitor (c. Oct–Mar)
- Passage (Mar–Apr, Oct–Nov)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
The evening roost flight in winter: in the olive groves of Tunisia and northern Algeria, in the Nile Delta or in northern Israel flocks of tens of thousands of birds swirl like smoke through the sky, often pursued by a Peregrine Falcon or Eurasian Sparrowhawk. In the Maghreb it pays to scan the flocks for Spotless Starlings.
Conservation status
Not globally threatened. Strongly declined in much of Europe due to agricultural intensification. In this region it is regarded as a pest of olive growing and is locally hunted and trapped in the Maghreb.
Scientific name
Sturnus vulgaris | Linnaeus, 1758
Linnaeus described the species in 1758 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. He introduced the genus Sturnus in that same work. Sturnus is the Latin word for 'starling'. vulgaris is Latin for 'common, ordinary'. The specimen the first description was based on came from Sweden.