Love them or not, European Starlings are impossible to ignore. In breeding plumage they're glossy black shot through with purple and green iridescence, with a bright yellow bill; in winter they're densely spangled with white spots. Starlings strut rather than hop, jab their bills into lawns like little oil derricks, and gather in enormous, fluid evening flocks — murmurations — that twist over Michigan farmland in fall.
Every starling in North America descends from about a hundred birds released in New York's Central Park in 1890–91. They are accomplished mimics, weaving imitations of killdeer, meadowlarks, and even mechanical sounds into their squeaky, rambling songs.
Insects and other invertebrates probed from short grass in summer; fruit, berries, grain, and scraps the rest of the year. Their strong jaw muscles are built to pry open — starlings insert a closed bill into turf and force it open to expose prey.
All North American starlings descend from birds released in Central Park, New York, in 1890–91. Within 60 years they had reached the Pacific. They are considered an invasive species.
A huge, coordinated flock of starlings that twists and pulses like smoke, usually before settling into a roost at dusk. Each bird tracks only its nearest neighbors — the mesmerizing whole emerges from those simple rules.
After the fall molt, each fresh feather has a white tip — the "stars." Those tips wear off over winter, so by spring the bird is glossy black without ever molting again. The bill also turns from dark to yellow.
They are. Numbers are highest from April through July, and the birds do not leave the state, though individuals shift around locally between nesting cover, woodlots, and feeders as food supplies change.
It is a juvenile. Young starlings are a uniform dusty gray-brown with a dark bill and look so unlike their parents that they are regularly reported as an unknown species. They molt into spotted plumage in late summer, often looking half-and-half in the process.
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