These iridescently beautiful birds can slow time, reproduce the human voice and sing like angels — so why have we nicknamed them ‘stinker’ and ‘scootie’?
A surprising members of the Unloved Birds Club is the starling. Mark Cocker explains why.
Some may be shocked even to find starlings among the Unloved Birds’ Club, given their striking appearance: they are among our most beautiful garden birds. The dark plumage is copiously speckled with hundreds of white or gingery arrowhead spots, set off by a deep iridescent gloss that means the whole bird shines purple or emerald depending on the sunlight.
More recently, starlings have come to be recognised for a beauty that surpasses even these surface aesthetics. When flocks come to roost at dusk, they create protean shapes across the evening sky, murmurations that are championed as one of the great events in all of Britain’s natural world. What, exactly, can the species have done to earn our displeasure?
Until recently, many British city councils broadcast the alarm calls of peregrines or other raptors to deter starling roosts.
Ironically, it is those night-time gatherings that are the source for a less positive attitude. If starling roosts persist for weeks, they can leave large quantities of guano, sometimes toxic enough to kill the roost trees and underlying vegetation. These products once gave rise to a set of old dialect names for starlings, including ‘shitlegs’, ‘stinker’ and ‘scootie’ (Scots dialect for bird poo).
If eight million birds roost above your city home each night, as they did in Rome earlier this century, what they leave on your cars and pavements and gardens can make the matter feel personal. It was for exactly these reasons that, until recently, many British city councils broadcast the alarm calls of peregrines or other raptors to deter starling roosts. Flocks of the birds once gathered nightly in London and were enjoyed by commuters for bringing a sense of something wild and beautiful to the heart of the metropolis. On one occasion, however, the unthinkable happened, when so many birds landed together on the hands of Big Ben’s tower that this quintessence of all things British slowed temporarily, causing the clock to lose 4½ minutes.
Another aspect of starlings can arouse offence. They are essentially grassland inhabitants, which moved into urban or suburban settings when their numbers expanded with the intensification of agriculture in the 19th century. The birds adapted beautifully to town life, nesting in our roof eaves and finding food in the streets or on rubbish dumps, but also increasingly on garden bird tables.
Starlings sitting in groups can make for a weighty clan — some even slowed down Big Ben by sitting on one of the the clock's hand once.
Starlings in feeding mode are intense and their dagger-like bill can create a charge of aggression. I recall my parents’ distaste for the birds as they mobbed the fat balls. They were simply too successful, accused of out-competing all the others. Even worse are the occasions that they raid the feeding trays full of grain and cow-cake for stalled herds in the farmyard. A farmer friend complains bitterly of the cost of this form of starling larceny.
If anything could redeem the bird, it’s the remarkable voice. The song is an intense, free-form medley, full of jumbled whistling, wheezy, clucking and popping sounds. Into this starling stream of consciousness come perfect mimetic fragments of owl, buzzard and curlew calls. The range of these vocal borrowings is astonishing and includes horses, goats, cats, dogs, foxes, frogs, even captive gibbons. Most impressive is its ability to reproduce anthropic sounds, including the human voice; a Roman emperor apparently had a pet bird that could recite Greek and Latin.
The full spectrum of its borrowings from urban life makes the starling one of the great modernist composers. Items recorded include the alarms from reversing buses, the electronic bloop of car locks, the beeps at pedestrian crossings and phone ringtones of all kinds, not to mention workmen’s wolf whistles.
Starlings are essentially grassland inhabitants which moved into urban or suburban settings when their numbers expanded.
Through all this mimicry there are clear signs of their authors’ mischievousness, as well as their deep intelligence, but one starling motif that I heard of recently should surely bring a smile to the lips even of their worst critics. It was the reproduced music of children all laughing as they played together on a trampoline.
This feature originally appeared in the June 10, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.
