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Sorry Wim. I was phoned by a neighbour and pressed the wrong buttons.
To continue. Starlings are certainly a pest here. A farmer once told me he took the trouble to watch starlings feeding on his newly seeded paddock. They waited till the seeds sent up shoots and then used the shoot to guide their beak down to the seed so they could swallowing both. Clever birds. But for fruit farmers not at all welcome.
As I guess you know there’s a starling trap on the Nullarbor to prevent them getting to West Australia. I don’t know how effective this still is or if still operating. Here in Gloucester I used to see a small flock in the Avon river valley but it’s declined recently. As have so many of our native species. Extreme heat, drought and fires are having a drastic effect. A neighbour found 3 micro bats dead in her garden last week. We’d had a very hot two days. Now more heat promised.
We also have a very healthy population of House Sparrows in town hunted by resident sparrwhawks but they remain close to human habitations. They haven’t ousted native birds, as far as I can tell, just slotted in to a vacant niche. I’ve found them far out west at Mungo National Park nesting in the old sheep shearing sheds and in other country towns.
Now the Common Myna is or can be a problem as it nests in hollows or roofs. They are very good parents and can oust native nesting birds from a hollow. I assisted a French visiting scientist in researching mynas nesting in my area over 3 years. We found little evidence of their dominating nesting boxes in street trees and park trees and no negative interactions with eastern rosellas that also used the boxes. I suspect we haven’t yet got a sufficiently big population of mynas yet to cause this problem. But I’ve seen mynas in the Hawaiian islands in plague proportions going to roost. They and a turtle dove of some species were benefiting from careless farming methods spilling seed around the yards.
Let’s face it. The true problem is us. We are destroying the natural world on which we depend for a healthy life for all. Too many or too greedy, depending where you live.
Keep watching the birds and all that grows around you.
On Sat, Feb 18, 2023, at 10:26 AM, Penny wrote:
Hi Wim
Sorry to hear you got bombarded with hate for starlings. People get very ruffled here over the problems caused by introduced species that become pests, and resort to inflammatory words words far too quickly. We have dreadful problems in our environment
On Fri, Feb 17, 2023, at 9:49 PM, Willem Jan Marinus Vader via Birding-Aus wrote:
From: Wim Vader <>
Sent: tirsdag 14. februar 2023 11:43
To: Willem Jan Marinus Vader <>
Cc: Riet Keuchenius <>; Hayo H.W. Velthuis <>
Subject: Starlings as shorebirds
Starlings as shorebirds (In defense of starlings)
When I mention in my writings, that we here in the Tromsø area have put up nest boxes especially for Starlings, I always get surprised and/or irritated reactions: "Do you really want to help these pestilential birds? You can get ours". I am of course fully aware of the fact that the European Starling Sturnus vulgaris in many parts of the world is an unwelcome newcomer, often outcompeting local birds for nesting holes, but here the situation is different: Starlings belong here and the numbers are dangerously decreasing, due to changes in agricultural
practices and lack of nesting opportunities in modern houses and farms. And Starlings are welcome harbingers of soon coming spring in N. Norway, where they are among the earlier migrants.
It is very much a pity that Starlings have such a bad reputation, as it prevents people from looking closer at these most intelligent opportunists. They also have a definite devil-may-care personality; the great naturalist Jac. P. Thijsse
in the Netherlands caught this perfectly in his ex libris, which showed a starling singing in the rain, with as text 'Onbekommerd' (i.e. No worries).
Starlings are opportunists, and here I want to give a few examples that they even may act as shore birds now and then; in fact, they forage a lot in the intertidal here in northern Norway, and the few that try to winter, are invariably
on the outermost islands.
I grew up in the Netherlands and as a student took part in yearly summercamps on 'Shorebirds and Bottom fauna', where we studied the feeding habits of the many shorebirds in the Wadden Sea. I was the bottomfauna man and i.a. got to know
the manifold tracks made by the invertebrates living in the mud. One very characteristic somewhat star-shaped track, usually high up in the intertidal, we learned to know as the track of the large polychaete Nereis diversicolor. And I discovered that the local Starlings also had learned to recognize this track: they now and then flew from one track to another and often extracted the worms.
In Norway I have often watched Starlings foraging in the stony intertidal, but usually it was not possible to pinpoint the prey. I suspect they often took my beloved amphipods, often turning around stones as deftly
as the Turnstones. One day, when I collected along the Sognefjord, the local starlings were so closely bound to intertidal foraging, that they collected and loafed on overhead wires for the few hours that the tides prevented them from foraging on the shore!
I have found also the southerly Spotless Starling foraging in the intertidal, on a sandy shore near Santander in northern Spain. I am unsure about the prey there, but I suspect they took beachhoppers.
As I said, Starlings are opportunists and it was therefore hardly a surprise when I found them scrounging on the shrimp boats in the harbour of Den Helder. They flew off and on and probably fed the shrimps to their begging young, still in the nest boxes. In Western Norway, there is seasonally in the fjords an active 'sardine' fishery, actually on Sprat Clupea sprattus. The fish are kept for a while in large standing nets after catching, where there is some mortality. The local starlings flew like small helicopters over the nets and picked up the floating dead sprats. I have seen similar activity in Holland, where some ever resourceful Starlings even used a small floating piece of wood as basis.
Starlings are highly intelligent and resourceful birds (One 'played hummingbird' to get at the peanut butter in Riet's garden recently!), and always well worth watching. They definitely are not 'only evil', as many in the US and Australia seem to think.
Wim Vader, Tromsø, N. Norway
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