Common starling

Starlings eat bugs and worms from the grass.

They poke their beaks into the ground to find them. They also eat berries and seeds.

Starlings will eat nearly anything, but they love insects and other small creatures when they can find them: grasshoppers, beetles, caterpillars, earthworms, snails and spiders. They also eat berries, cherries, grains and seeds.

Watch a starling on a lawn. It hurries across the grass, pushing its closed bill into the ground. Then it uses strong jaw muscles to open its bill underground, making a little gap to look for hidden bugs.

Starlings are generalists that concentrate on insects and other invertebrates when available: grasshoppers, beetles, flies, caterpillars, snails, earthworms, millipedes and spiders. They also take fruit such as cherries and mulberries, grains, seeds, nectar, livestock feed and garbage.

Their signature foraging method is open-bill probing: a bird pushes its closed bill into the soil, then uses strong muscles to force it open, parting the soil to expose prey. Flocks often forage with other species such as grackles, blackbirds, house sparrows and American robins. Where they are introduced, the IUCN's invasive species database says starlings cost hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to farms each year.

On winter evenings, thousands of starlings fly together.

They swoop and swirl like one big cloud. Starlings are great copycats too. They can sound like other birds, or even a ringing phone!

On winter evenings, as the sun goes down, hundreds or even thousands of starlings gather and swoop across the sky in swirling flocks called murmurations. People once wondered whether the birds could read each other's minds! Scientists now know starlings react lightning-fast, copying the moves of the birds next to them.

Starlings are also amazing mimics. One bird can learn the calls of up to 20 other species, and starlings have copied car alarms, dog barks and phone ringtones.

Murmurations, the coordinated winter flocks seen as starlings gather at dusk, can involve thousands of birds. The RSPB explains the synchrony by very fast reaction times that let each bird match the flight path of its neighbors.

Starlings are gifted vocal mimics, using their syrinx, the bird voice box, to copy other birds (Cornell notes individuals learning the calls of up to 20 species) and sounds such as car alarms and phones. They are also assertive: flock members signal with wing-flicks and postures, and starlings drive other species, including eastern bluebirds, from nest cavities they want.

There are still lots of starlings.

But in some places there are far fewer than before. In the United Kingdom, there are less than half as many as about 30 years ago.

Starlings are still very common, and the IUCN lists them as Least Concern. But their numbers are falling. In the United Kingdom they declined by 57 percent between 1995 and 2023, and they are now on the UK's Red List of birds of high concern. In North America their numbers have also fallen by about half since 1966.

Where starlings were brought by people, they can be a problem: they eat crops and take nest holes from native birds such as eastern bluebirds.

The IUCN assessed the species as Least Concern in 2018, with a decreasing population of about 150 million mature individuals; it names livestock farming and ranching and hunting and trapping as threats. The RSPB reports a 57 percent UK decline between 1995 and 2023, and Cornell cites a cumulative 50 percent fall in North America between 1966 and 2023.

Where it has been introduced, Iziko's Biodiversity Explorer says it is considered a serious agricultural pest in some regions, and Cornell calls it a fierce competitor for nest holes. Its effect on native birds is debated: the IUCN's invasive species database says it contributes to their decline, while a 2003 study of 27 North American cavity-nesting species, cited by Cornell, found clear declines only in sapsuckers.