Starlings

We have a starling that sits on our eastern neighbor’s antennae every evening just before sundown, cooing and gurgling as only happy starlings can do. He or she seems so overjoyed to see another day end with no calamities, sort of like me in my November days. Starlings are such funny little creatures, ugly yet beautiful, awkward little bodies, short tails, sharp little yellow beaks. But oh how they can coo and gurgle and chirp. I remember our little starling family back in New York, living in a hole in our garage roof. Living there whenever they could take occupancy ahead of the squirrel that also wanted to call it home. Every spring, they’d return to clean it out before having their little starling babies. The female would sit in a nearby pine and simply sing her heart out before laying the eggs and then sitting on them until the little gluttons appeared. Then she and her husband would spend all day going back and forth catching bugs and worms to give to the tiny heads sticking out from the hole. And then, one day in late spring, they would all be gone, the parents off to wherever starlings went after the child rearing was over, the children off to raise their own families. We never saw them leave. Maybe they made their exits in the dead of night. Maybe the squirrel finally shooed them away. Or maybe they all joined the others in their amazing starling flights when thousand of them would all get together to perform for groundlings. If you’ve ever seen this amazing sight, you know what I mean by a performance—thousand of starlings cascading back and forth, in intricate sheets of flight, like smoke billowing and swerving and twirling. Better than talking about it, why not just look at it in this video on YouTube.