STARLINGS 
Sometimes these birds will roost amid rushes by the water’s edge, pack¬ 
ing down the plants by the weight of their numbers. The singing of large 
groups is an indescribable chattering, but the individual male starling 
utters a clear, high, long-drawn-out whistle. Not content with their own 
tunes, starlings also imitate the songs of many other birds. Starlings are 
walking birds—not hoppers. 
Though these birds are now common in the United States east of the 
Mississippi, they are not native to this country. Sixty of them brought from 
western Europe were released in Central Park, New York City, in 1890, 
and forty the following year. Since then they have multiplied tremendously 
and have adapted themselves to the entire eastern and middle-western 
regions of the United States. They do not, in this country, engage in regu¬ 
lar migrations. They show, however, some tendency to move southward in 
winter. 
In the fall starlings often leave the countryside for the cities, where 
they crowd together in church towers, and in crannies where their large 
numbers can keep them warm. Some observers have counted twenty-five 
hundred to three thousand starlings in a single church tower. By day they 
repair to the parks and the outlying country to forage for berries and 
insects, but at night they return to the comforts of the city. In some cities, 
particularly Washington, D. C., they are so numerous as to be looked upon 
as pests. An ornithologist’s dictum has it that “it’s an ill bird that bodes 
nobody good,” and because starlings destroy insects they are generally 
regarded as beneficial. 
The country homes of starlings are nests of grass and twigs in a 
woodpecker’s hole or in a hollow tree. They breed in April, and by the 
middle of May the young are already uttering their harsh guttural food- 
cry. The eggs, four to six in number, are pale blue. At the end of May a 
second brood is sometimes raised. By that time the young of the first brood 
have already begun to form the flocks which by late summer may contain 
many thousands of birds. 
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