Science: Versatile Sturnus

The common European starling, Sturnus vulgaris, is a black-hued bird with a blue-green iridescence on its glossy plumage. Introduced to the U. S. in 1890 to crowd out sparrows, starlings themselves have become a nuisance in some eastern cities, notably Washington. When they gang up in great flocks, as they often do, they make a dreadful din. But when performing solo, Sturnus vulgaris is one of the most versatile of all bird mimics. It not only imitates the songs of many birds but also reproduces, with uncanny fidelity, the cackle of a laying hen, the tentative chirps of young robins, the plaint of annoyed guinea fowl, even the mew of a kitten or the whistling of a boy.*

Starlings have long memories, sometimes tossing off the calls of summer birds in the dead of winter. Moreover, like humans, they occasionally gocrazy over a popular bird tune number, most of the birds in a murmuration repeating it over & over until at last they get tired of it and discard it. Botanist Harry Ardell Allard of the U. S. Department of Agriculture has devotedly studied the mimicry of starlings, coaxing them to perform by placing nesting boxes outside his window. In Science last week he reported a prodigy. One starling, having imitated the long, low, monotonous call of a flicker, remembered the flicker’s tattoo on a tree, gave a perfect rendition of it by drumming with its beak on the top of its box. “To my mind,” observed the bemused scientist, “this is one of the most remarkable instances of mimicry, since it has demanded an entirely new [for a starling] method of mechanical sound production.”

* Starlings also have a nondescript call of their own. “The greater part of it,” says Ornithologist Aretas A. Saunders, “is sibilant, fricative [sounds of zh, sh, th], or harsh and rattling, but here and there the bird intersperses loud, clear, slurred whistles, most of them slurred downward. . . . The young, when gathering in their first flocks in June and committing depredations in cherry trees, make a loud grating or hissing noise.”

† Under the front portico of the National Archives Building.