They don’t even spend the night at home!

Thanks to the transmitters, we now know quite well that common starlings do not sleep in their nest hollows, but fly 6–10 km away to spend the night in reed beds or damp thickets. As they are swift flyers, this doesn’t take them long at all, and whilst the female initially stays in her nesting area with her chicks, as soon as the chicks have fledged, they are left to fend for themselves and the female also begins to spend the night away from home.

A varied diet

The common starling’s foraging range is very compact; it prefers visiting potato fields, pea fields, summer barley fields, and grasslands near water bodies, while avoiding winter cereal crops. Therefore, a single nesting box or a single suitable habitat is not enough for the common starling. A varied landscape is needed, featuring both low-lying grasslands and various types of farmland for foraging, as well as wetlands for safe roosting.

A common starling brood can destroy thousands of forest cockchafers, slugs, and click beetles during the growing season, making it an effective natural predator of pests.

A man like an orchestra

The common starling starts its day around four o’clock in the morning and only finishes its activities an hour before midnight. Whilst the chicks are fed in the morning, the birds spend the afternoons more on their own. And if it seems to you that on an early spring morning you are woken by an entire orchestra, it may well be just a single male common starling imitating the calls of many other bird species – the common rosefinch, the Eurasian curlew, the common crane, the western jackdaw, the Eurasian golden oriole, the song thrush, and the common swift. But that’s not all: it can also mimic the croaking of a frog, the creaking of a door, a cat’s meow, and the starting of a motorbike.

They tend not to roam from Estonia in the summer

GPS-tagged common starlings also revealed that they no longer undertake a southward intermediate migration, meaning that summer habitat use may have changed in recent years due to climate change or some other factor.

However, BirdLife Estonia would also like to encourage anyone who has not yet put up a nest box for common starlings this spring to do so. Survey results show that nest boxes are in demand even when put up late in the season, because suitable nesting sites remain in short supply.

While common starlings are fascinating birds to study, BirdLife Estonia is doing so primarily to ensure that the findings on farmland bird habitat use, and the resulting proposals for maintaining and enhancing the biodiversity of agricultural landscapes, are incorporated into the new funding period of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy.