European Starling

Sturnus vulgaris · Starlings

Starling murmuration over the reserve

Dungeness, 20 December 2025

The whole starling flock pulled back to show the shape it is drawing against the evening sky at Dungeness, reeds and open water below. Dungeness is one of the better-known murmuration sites in the country, the starlings gathering over the reedbeds at dusk in winter before dropping in to roost for the night.

The display is thought to be partly defence - a Peregrine or a harrier working the roost cannot pick one bird out of a moving cloud - and partly a way of gathering the whole population of the marsh into one warm roost.

Starlings over the reserve

Dungeness, 20 December 2025

A pass of the evening starling murmuration low over the water at Dungeness in December, a few birds' wingtips nearly brushing the surface. Starlings gather over the reedbeds here at dusk in winter, thousands of them from the farmland around, before dropping in to roost.

The flock thins and thickens as birds peel off and rejoin. Nobody in a murmuration is leading. Each bird tracks its seven nearest neighbours and matches them, and that rule alone, run across thousands of birds at once, produces the shapes - the same maths that describes a shoal of fish.

European Starling

Central Park, 26 October 2025

A European Starling in Central Park in October, in winter plumage heavily spangled with white spots that will wear away by spring to leave the glossy, unspotted black breeding coat underneath. Starlings live wherever people do, across Europe, Asia and now every continent but Antarctica.

Every European Starling in North America descends from roughly a hundred birds released in Central Park itself in the early 1890s, in a since-abandoned attempt to introduce every bird mentioned in Shakespeare. There are now about two hundred million of them.