The starling, aka the common starling or, in the USA, the European starling, is a familiar bird. But you never see one hanging out by itself – they’re always out and about in flocks, swarming over lawns or on rooftop aerials. Even during the breeding season, flocks of brown youngsters, so different to the smart spangled adults, form crèche flocks, learning all about being a starling.
Starlings were one of the first birds that I noticed as a fledgling birder. At the tender age of five, and without a field guide, let alone a pair of binoculars, I recognised them in my north London back garden. Back then I named birds as I saw them, so starlings were christened ‘mummy birds’, while blackbirds I deemed to be ‘daddy birds’.
I was lucky to witness the dying days of those grand inner-London murmurations, whose numbers allegedly peaked at more than 100,000 birds. The flocks weren’t called murmurations then. Despite being a word originating from the late 15th century, it has only come to be used as a collective noun fairly recently. Those incredible roosts in London suddenly collapsed to practically zero birds in the 1980s, reflecting the start of the decline of this species in Britain. Now, would-be starling-gazers in the UK have to journey far and wide to find a sizeable roost.
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And so to Rome. Flocks of hundreds of thousands of birds create an amazing aerial spectacle there – a tourist attraction of the Eternal City in their own right. But where do they all come from?
An influx of migrants involving many millions of birds comes in from northern Europe and further east to spend the winter in the rest of Europe, including Britain. There are thought to be a total of 5–10 million birds that descend upon Rome between October and February, when they return to their breeding grounds. Starlings have roosted in the Italian capital since Roman times, but it was only in the 1920s that the large numbers that we know today started to form.
The birds are attracted to cities to roost because they are warmer than the countryside and offer more protection from predators – literally safety in numbers. Their grand murmurations are thought to be a signal for smaller flocks to join the main flock to roost. But when nightly performances are over and they settle down, things become less pretty. Thousands pack into the trees, bending the branches under their weight. And they poo incessantly – a kind of ‘poo rain’.
As a result of an olive-rich diet (the fruits are consumed during the day when birds visit the surrounding countryside), droppings are sticky and oily, causing the surfaces they fall upon to be slippery. Cars and buildings are also coated, with corrosive results. It is said that 10 million birds produce 7 tonnes of guano – nightly.
To combat this, men in white biohazard suits and face protection masks, nicknamed ‘starling busters’, rock up under the roosting trees armed with megaphones blasting out the alarm calls of the starlings amplified 100 times. The birds panic and fly off en masse to find somewhere else to settle down. Recently, officials have also started turning up to shine laser lights into the assembled avian crowd, while falconers have been sending in falcons to scatter the flocks.
So, when in Rome, do what the Romans do: enjoy the murmurations but don’t stand under the trees!
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Top image: starlings flying over St. Peter's Basilica. Credit: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP via Getty
