Common starling
Sturnus vulgaris
— Where the name comes from
Sturnus is the Latin name of the bird, kin to the English starling and the German Star: a very old Indo-European root, a sign that this species has been around European houses since before the languages we speak today. Vulgaris means “common”, and in its case that is an understatement: it is one of the most numerous birds on the planet.
— Facts
- Group
- Birds · Aves
- Order
- Passerines
- Habitat
- Cities, farmland, pasture, reedbeds for roosting
- Range
- Eurasia; introduced to North America, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand
- Size
- 19–23 cm, wingspan 31–44 cm, 60–100 g
- Diet
- Insects, earthworms, olives, fruit, scraps
- Lifespan
- 5 years in the wild
— Characteristics
- 01
The plumage looks black from a distance and is metallic green and violet close to.
- 02
It imitates other birds, mobile phones and car alarms.
- 03
It sleeps in communal roosts that can exceed a million birds.
— What sets it apart
The clouds it draws over cities at dusk have been measured, and the rule that governs them is simple: each starling keeps track of its six or seven nearest neighbours, not of everyone within a given distance. That alone is enough for a change of direction to cross a hundred thousand birds in half a second with nobody in command. The physicists who found it, filming the flocks over Rome with synchronised cameras, discovered that the correlations have no scale: the flock behaves like a material at its critical point, on the verge of changing state.
