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Missing the Starlings

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  • FireFire Posts: 19,096
    I miss seeing the huge murmurations.

    Apparently murmurations are so rare now in some places, that there are apps you can get to alert you when the birds start to gather in numbers.
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  • SuesynSuesyn Posts: 664
    We seem to have plenty here in rural somerset, a neighbour has a roosting site in a poplar tree and I love to hear them but she complains about the mess they make. In fact she said she would have removed the tree because of the starlings if it were not for the fact that it has a preservation order on it!   
  • plant pauperplant pauper Posts: 6,904
    @MrsGlaze I have Leycesteria formosa in my garden and the starlings go mad for the berries that form inside the racemes of flowers. That's probably how I got it in the first place because I certainly didn't plant it!  :)
    Maybe, if you wanted to encourage them, you could plant it. Some people think it's a bit of a thug but I love it and it's easily chopped down if it gets too tall.


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  • LynLyn Posts: 23,190
    Plenty in Devon, but last weeks cold snap has seen them clear off.  I haven’t had one on the feeders since then. They may have moved further down in Cornwall for a while.
    i love to see the great cloud of them but they do scare off the other birds and are greedy with the food. 
    Gardening on the wild, windy west side of Dartmoor. 

  • We have a little gang of starlings who come to the garden. They're the only ones who seem to like my homemade fat balls! The resident Blackbirds don't like them much and spend a lot of time fruitlessly trying to chase them away. I like to think of it as our garden's version of lions and hyenas.
    “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” Winston Churchill
  • DovefromaboveDovefromabove Posts: 88,147
    edited March 2018
    We have a little flock of starlings around this neighbourhood in the winter ... I think they join up with their mates in the evening and roost in the reeds on the marshes ... but a couple of weeks ago, as has happened in other years, the gang divided up into pairs and 'our' pair, who usually nest in our next door neighbour's roof, are back in our garden, feeding from our feeders and the male, in his shiny spotted spring plumage, is sitting on the corner of the roof whistling away while presumably his mate is snug on her nest under the eaves.
     :) 

    Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.





  • RubyLeafRubyLeaf Posts: 260
    During Feb-March last year we had a swarm! They devoured the fat cake and food, which I didn't mind since during those months we barely get any birds.
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