Have a listen to this:
https://xeno-canto.org/1066013
This is an example of one of my absolute favourite birdsongs. Indeed, the sound of starlings often gets me to do another bit of recording even when I’m really tired and need to go home. When I’m recording birds, I go into such a state of hyperfocus that my body stops sending me the important signals of depleting energy levels. Until, after a good three hours, it just hits me, often quite suddenly, that I need rest, food, and just need to sit down for a while. So I walk home, resisting the urge to record, even though I can hear a robin singing on a tree branch, a black bird inside some vegetation, or a wren that is, somewhere, they’re so good at hiding. But I must resist. Three hours of intense hyper focus on bird song is too much, and now I must recharge!
But, when I hear the starling, I can resist no more. “You must rest!” protests my body and my brain. “But I just want to get a quick thirty second recording” I respond. “You’ll get a recording much longer than that, and you know it!” responds my body and my brain. My body and brain have surely won the logical argument, but it doesn’t matter. There is a starling singing a beautiful, magnificent song, and I must have a recording of it.
Part of what intrigues me about starlings, is that they often tend to live in such “ordinary” places, and yet are such amazing singers. I mean, imagine you were watching a film about a bird with an amazing song. You would expect some guy with a staff and a beard to tell you, “You must cross the bridge of a thousand damnations, swim through the river of unexcreted souls, and climb the mountain of Apollo’s Elbow, and at the stroke of midnight, then, and only then, will you hear the bird song so amazing that you will live for thousands of years!
But in real life it’s a bit less dramatic than than. Where do you find starlings? Housing estates. No need to journey through the forest of dramaticness or whatever. You’ll easily find them in housing estates.
For me their presence in housing estates is both a gift and a curse. A gift because I’m literally only a 30 second walk from finding them. Indeed, a few of my starling recordings are from when I wasn’t out to do a birding session at all, but from just when I was out to do a bit of shopping. I barely have to leave my house to find them. That’s literally true often times, they often show up in my back yard!
And a curse because, they are competing with so many other sounds in a housing estate. The constant sound of car engines, and children, randomly screaming. There’s a lot of children, just randomly screaming. (It’s okay, I’ve been assured this is just what the kids like to do these days, they’re not in any danger!)
Given that context, I wasn’t all that surprised when I got this recording of a starling in a housing estate:
https://xeno-canto.org/1070190
The starling’s ability at mimicry is absolutely legendary. So really, it was only a matter of time, before I encountered a starling that mimicked a child screaming! This was the first example I recorded of a starling imitating a human. And this is my first example, from only a few days ago, of a starling mimicking a siren:
https://xeno-canto.org/1070862
These birds are able to imitate quite a lot of different animals, and humans, and machinery, and natural sounds in the environment. But, even after more than a year of recording bird sounds, I admit that I’m only just scratching the surface. Indeed, the problem I’m having is that I’m only recognizing sounds that, well, I know how to recognize. If someone was to ask me what’s a starling’s favourite sounds to mimic, I would probably respond, “Curlews and buzzards”. Here’s two recordings I did of that.
https://xeno-canto.org/1070185
But then again, the sounds of curlews and buzzards are two of the bird sounds I best recognize. So it’s going to seem to me that starlings mimic these two a lot, when in reality, the curlew and buzzard mimicry is probably just a small fraction of what they do.
I was initially a bit confused by the mimicry of these two birds. Where were starlings encountering them? Later I found out, when I realized that there are often starlings along the Cork Harbour Greenway. Here they’ll encounter plenty of curlews. How they’re coming into contact with buzzards is a bit more surprising. I once saw, and I could barely believe my eyes, two starlings chasing away a buzzard! I couldn’t believe the bravery of these tiny birds going after a buzzard! I was as surprised that the buzzard flew away. I had already gotten used to the sight of them turning tail and flying at the sight of medium sized birds, such as gulls, hooded crows and magpies, but even I was surprised to see a buzzard flying scared at the sight of two tiny starlings!
Now if you’ve got the time, why not listen to a longer recording I took, of nine minutes. I just listened to it with my eyes closed, distraction free, and I’d recommend you do the same:
https://xeno-canto.org/1036139
This recording was taken in the countryside by the ocean in August. Luckily they also congregate in such rural areas, so I was able to get quite a few recordings without suburban noise, but even there I was contending with the occasional passing car. While on this recording there’s a point of confusion in that there are also other birds singing in places, I hope this recording gives you a good idea as to why I have absolutely fallen in love with starling song.
Of all the bird song I’ve heard, starling song probably has the most unexpected twists and turns. To listen to them is to go on a wild journey, where you don’t know where you’re even going to end up. After getting more than one hundred recordings of starlings, after encountering them in suburban areas, in inland rural areas, on estuaries, and near the ocean, I have concluded that the starling is one of the most original singers I’ve ever heard.
In very broad terms, you can up to a point say you know what you’re going to get with a starling song. Indeed, how would we even recognize it as starling song if that weren’t the case? I’ve come to know and love the weird sci-fi bleeps that they love to make. But there’ll almost always be a few weird and wonderful surprises. What is that, mimicry of water? Now all of the starlings sound like a bunch of robots. Oh now they’re doing that ascending sound I love so much! And now, one of them is whistling, the other is doing some percussive sounds, and another is throwing in some buzzard mimicry. This is the best concert I’ve ever been at, and it’s all free!
So my argument is that the starling is the most original bird singer, that I’ve heard anyway. And I’m well aware of the danger of putting human terms onto the bird. What does originality mean anyway, just in terms of humans? And what does it mean to say a bird singer is original?
Is it even possible to stop hearing birds through a human lens? I know for a fact that most robin song is the robin quite aggressively telling all the other birds to fuck off, and yet when I hear that song, I feel a great joy, it feels soothing, and it makes my spirit soar, even though I know for a fact that it’s just a robin shouting abuse at some other birds. So maybe that’s the answer to it, or non-answer to it, I don’t even know, I’m going to hear birds the way I hear them, regardless of the objective truth about what’s going on in reality with bird song.
But maybe that feeling, that you’re getting something new, and exciting, and original, when you hear starling song, isn’t just a feeling. Maybe there’s some truth to it. What intrigues me about starlings, is that they are life long song learners. That means, an old starling will have a greater amount of sounds accumulated, and songs developed, than younger starlings. Seán Ronayne talks about that here:
https://www.rte.ie/culture/2025/0205/1494674-bird-songs-with-sean-ronayne-the-starling/
And much like Seán, I’d give anything to hear the song of the starling that lived for just under 23 years. What wonders would we hear if we got to hear this bird?
Through mixing and matching the sounds of other birds, humans, the sounds of the environment both natural and human made, the starling manages to craft a song that is uniquely its own. A bit of moorhen mimicry here, a bit of siren mimicry there, this master composer manages to pull together hundreds, perhaps thousands of different sounds, weaving them together until it is no longer just bits and pieces of audio nicked from others, but is an original masterpiece. Starling song doesn’t sound like anything else. It broadly, doesn’t sound like any other bird song. It doesn’t sound like any human singer, even though some birds, like the blackbird, sound a bit like humans whistling.
If you try to apply human musical genres to it, you’re still kind of lost. The music of the starling is very fluid and free, good luck trying to set a metronome to it, and yet it doesn’t sound anything like human genres that try to get away from traditional concepts of melody, harmony and rhythm, such as free jazz. Starling song sits in this weird grey area between structured and structure-less.
I try to be aware of the danger of anthropomorphizing these birds, but, what I’m trying to do, is not limit music, and musical genre, to the human domain. Why should we consider our own species the only one capable of making music? Do other species not have the ability to make beautiful, amazing sounds that compete with the sounds of human made music? That’s why if you asked me what some of my favourite musical genres are, I wouldn’t hesitate to put starling song alongside my other favourite genres such as prog, metal and various types of folk music.
Speaking of folk music. Yeah. Starlings could be said to have a kind of folk music. In this video from Lucy Lapwing, she tells an incredible story about a group of starlings that lived in a bothy on the Isle Of Coll.
The starlings were imitating the sound of an engine, that didn’t run in their lifetime. The engine had since rusted over. The starling that first heard the engine, passed it onto their descendants, who passed it onto theirs, and so on and so forth.
I’ve been absolutely fascinated by this story since I first heard it. None of the starlings that were currently imitating the engine, had ever heard it. So, the engine sound was a kind of a folk song to them. Or to put it another way, the sound of that engine had passed into legend.
In case you’re curious as to what these birds look like, well here’s a picture I took a few days ago:
As you can see, not content to upstage the other birds by being the most innovative singers of all time, they also have to outdo them in the fashion department. Look at that fancy getup!
I’m going to leave you with another long recording of starlings. This one is in a noisy environment, the starlings are competing with engine noise, sirens, and a soccer match! But “competing” is probably the wrong word. I would have loved to visit the same starlings a few days later, and heard how they had incorporated the sounds that suburbia produced that day into their ever increasingly complex songs:
https://xeno-canto.org/1064345
So, it’s entirely possible that there’s some starlings living near you. Why not give yourself the best present imaginable and go listen to their weird, and wonderful, and amazingly original singing?
Ponderings Of An Autist 