By Holly Maynard
What’s up Starling? I’ve been keeping my eye on your movement. I can’t see no room for improvement. Why you all over there with the Jackdaws.
Ok, Dizzee Rascal joke aside, I have been intently watching my local population of starlings this year, and they have given me more joy than I could have ever imagined. I have been reflecting on my time during lockdown recently, and whilst we are not over the hurdle yet, it feels like we are gaining some sort of normality back into our lives. Amongst the midst of all the uncertainty that this year has bought, there have been moments of positivity and happiness, and I think we have a lot to learn.
During the first stages of lockdown, I found myself overwhelmed with emotions, which I am sure many of you can relate to: anxiety, stress, worry, uncertainty, boredom. However, as I started to ease into home life, I realised there were many positives surrounding my day. I had more time to exercise, to enjoy the garden, to watch the sunset and to walk in my local park. I started to really notice the small things. Those minor ‘insignificant’ things. On a normal work morning, I would be running around like a headless chicken, trying to get everything organised for the day, making sure I took something out of the freezer for dinner, hanging up last night’s washing, oh and if I was really lucky, grabbing myself a slice of toast for the journey into the office. But now I had time to enjoy my morning coffee before my working day. To sit outside in the garden and enjoy waking up with the birds. And that is how it began.
I started to put all my focus into the garden. If that was going to be the view from my new home office, then I wanted to enjoy it to its full potential! I planted wildflowers and vegetables, I put up a bug hotel and I became obsessed with hanging bird feeders all over the place. At first, I had no feathery visitors to the garden, and I felt quite disheartened by my efforts, however once the suet nuggets came into play, that was it. I think I had four Starlings arrive on the feeder within an hour.
Starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) are fantastic little birds: full of personality, charisma, and chat. Trust me, you will hear them before you see them.
Image from Pixabay
They are resident to the UK and although their distribution is fairly widespread, they are most abundant in Southern England. Starlings enjoy a range of habitats, from gardens and urban parks, to reedbeds located along our Southern coastlines. During the winter, their numbers will almost double, due to the influx of migrant Starlings arriving from Europe. They will gather together in large flocks, often in the thousands and undertake one of nature’s greatest spectacle’s: Murmuration. The entire flock will take to the evening sky and perform aerobatic displays, before returning back to their roost sites for the night. It has been well documented that grouping together can cause confusion to predators, making it more difficult to target one individual bird – safety in numbers, as they say. In addition, it is thought that this natural phenomena provides them with warmth and allows the flock to share valuable information such as important feeding sites. Clever right? I would urge you all to try and get out to witness this over the winter, it is honestly breath-taking.
Image by Elstef from Pixabay
The Big Garden Birdwatch, as run annually by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), concluded in this year’s report that Starlings are one of our most common garden visitors. However, despite them reaching the second most recorded species in the UK, their numbers are still down by a devastating 80% since 1979. We must do better.
Not only are they magnificent aerial acrobats, but they are strikingly beautiful. From a distance they can appear quite uniform, but once you take a closer look, you can really appreciate their true beauty. In the summer, their plumage becomes a shimmering tone of purples and greens, and in the winter, they sport a white speckled plumage.
Image from Pixabay
If I haven’t yet convinced you about these birds, let me tell you about June. Nearly two months into lockdown now and I was thoroughly enjoying my daily bird watching. Each morning, I would grab my large cafetiere of coffee and record which species were visiting the feeders, before logging on for another day at work.
June for me was a month of appreciation and understanding. Like many of you, I took part in 30 Days Wild, which is an annual challenge set up by the Wildlife Trusts to help connect people to nature. As part of this challenge, you have to carry out a ‘Random Act of Wildness’ each day. This can be as simple as planting wildflowers, watching the birds, feeling the grass between your toes, or going plastic-free for the day. The key thing to take away from the challenge is to just allow yourself to immerse in a little bit of nature every day. We all know being outdoors feels great, it is good for our wellbeing and our mental state. Not only was I excited to come up with new daily challenges, but I wanted to delve deeper into how each task made me feel. So, every day I wrote down my thoughts and feelings surrounding each Random Act of Wildness, in the aim to reflect on this at a later date.
1st of June 2020: I filled up our bird feeders with more suet nuggets.
Thoughts & Feelings: Here there are again. The Starlings. They know when those nuggets have been filled up. I swear they are watching me as much as I am watching them. They are boisterous and quite frankly greedy, but I love them all the more. During this strange time we find ourselves in, the garden, and more importantly the birds visiting the garden, have become my little escape, my daily dose of nature, my moment of tranquillity and a blatant reminder to me to appreciate quite literally what’s on my doorstep. Since March, I have been watching a group of adult Starlings visit the feeder every day. They gather together on the fence line and take it in turns to have a nibble at the feeder, although they often get a bit eager and squabble over who’s next in line. Some are clearly at the top of the pecking order, whereas others will simply peck away at the fallen nuggets on the ground.
They are truly beautiful birds, and I find myself getting distracted. The sunlight shines bright and accentuates their iridescent plumage and the speckles on their breast. They have been nesting within a circular dome at the top of a building adjacent to the house. Today was different though. I was getting dressed upstairs and I could hear the usual racket of the Starlings down in the garden. It bought a smile to my face. I looked out of the window to check up on them, but it wasn’t the usual gang. What were these noisy birds? Sure, they sound like Starlings but all I could see were a group of greyish-brown birds chatting along the fence line. When I went downstairs to take a closer look, I realised to my absolute delight that five Juvenile Starlings had turned up in the garden, and whilst they hadn’t yet developed their striking adult plumage, they still had all the charisma and chat that we associate starlings with, even if they don’t quite understand how social etiquette works when it comes to the feeder! I am pretty sure that these were the offspring of our neighbouring family nesting within the dome.
It is these small moments that can help bring us closer to nature. The more we observe, the more we see. The more we see, the more we will understand. And ultimately the more we understand, the more we care. For the mere amount of money that I have spent on bird feed this year, I have gained a whole deal more. I have gained months’ worth of pleasure watching a whole family of Starlings raise their young, and now I have the next generation in the garden going about their daily business on the feeder. I feel like a proud mum. I feel content. I feel connected. If anything, lockdown has taught me to open my eyes, and appreciate these moments, for they are far from insignificant.
Thank you, my little starlings, for keeping me sane whilst I have been stuck indoors.
My favourite charity:
Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust is a charity very close to my heart. It is an international charity with a clear mission of “saving species from extinction”. The Zoo was founded in 1963 by Gerald Durrell, who was a brilliant naturalist, and it was one of the first zoos set up with conservation in mind.
Why is it my favourite?
I grew up in Jersey, Channel Islands, which is where the Zoo is based. I visited the park with my gran at the age of 5 years old and I always remember saying to her “One day I am going to work with animals”. Durrell inspired me to a pursue a career in conservation and I have always been a big supporter ever since. The charity undertakes conservation projects all over the world and is part of successful captive breeding programmes for many threatened species. I would highly recommend a visit!
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