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The starlings are generally a highly social family. Most species associate in flocks of varying sizes throughout the year. Murmuration is the flocking of starlings, including the swarm behaviour of their large flight formations. [8] These flocks may include other species of starlings and sometimes species from other families.
Common starlings take advantage of agricultural fields, livestock facilities, and other human related sources of food and nest sites. Starlings often assault crops such as grapes, olives, and cherries by consuming excessive amounts of crops in large flock sizes and in new grain fields, starlings pull up young plants and eat the seeds. [122]
Photographer Søren Solkær captures mesmerizing snapshots of starling murmurations, from Ireland to Italy.
The Sturnus starlings are terrestrial species; they walk rather than hop, and have modifications to the skull and its muscles for open-bill probing. The latter adaptation has facilitated the spread of this genus from humid tropical southern Asia to cooler regions of Europe and Asia. Starlings nest in holes in trees or buildings.
Like other starlings, the greater blue-eared starling is an omnivore, taking a wide range of invertebrates, seeds, and berries, especially figs, but is diet is mainly insects taken from the ground. It will perch on livestock, feeding on insects disturbed by the animals and occasionally removing ectoparasites .
White-cheeked starlings are 24 cm in length. The adult male is mainly dark grey-brown with a paler belly and a whitish band across the rump. The head is blackish with whitish cheeks and forehead. There is a white border to the tail and white markings on the secondary wing feathers. The legs are pale orange and the bill is orange with a black tip.
Hildebrandt's starling (Lamprotornis hildebrandti) is a species of starling in the family Sturnidae.It forms a superspecies with and has previously been included in the same species as Shelley's starling, a migratory species ranging from Ethiopia and Somalia to Kenya.
Although starlings are a tropical family by origin, Tristram's starling is well adapted to living in a desert environment: it loses relatively little water to evaporation and produces less heat than expected for its base metabolic rate. Its dark plumage may help it survive in the desert winter, when temperatures are low but the Sun's radiation ...