Fans of a feather flock together

Press, 8 May 1985, Page 21

Fans of a feather flock together

Starlings, the football hooligans of the air, now have a supporters’ club of their own in Britain.

Noisy, dirty, and unkempt, the birds flock in mobs of thousands, causing havoc wherever they go. They are pests in cities, tear through the countryside leaving devastated fields behind them, and bully other birds off their stamping grounds.

Now a new society has been formed to promote them. The Starling Society, which claims to be “possibly the first ever to be devoted entirely to a single bird species,” holds that the birds are not so much bad as misunderstood.

Dr Nancy Benvenga, a musicologist from Harwich, Essex, says: “The starling is a much maligned bird.” She decided to form a society after discovering that starlings were “cute.”

“There must be many of us who love the ‘noisy, squabbling pests’ but believing ourselves to be in a minority — if, indeed not actually unique — are afraid to admit it. Now starling lovers can take heart. Our motto is ‘Speak out for Starlings.’

About 40 people have joined the society at a cost of $4.7 a year —-

which works out at about one fan for every 25 million birds. There are at least a billion starlings world-wide, for this is the most abundant wild bird on earth. The North American population alone numbers over 500 million, the descendants of just 200 birds released in Central Park in 1890 by an enthusiast so taken with the works of Shakespeare, that he wanted America to have every bird species mentioned by the Bard. Despite their phenomenal success, Dr Benvenga sees starlings as “the underdogs.” She says they are persecuted, and stoutly defends them against their detractors. Aren’t they noisy? “At least the starling has the decency to begin his sounds at a reasonably civilised hour. The solitary blackbird, who having begun his recital at an

ungodly hour, challenges his neighbours to join in until you haven’t a ghost of a chance of getting back to sleep.” What about starlings’ reputation for bullying other birds? “They are the models of peaceful coexistence with other species,” says Dr Benvenga. Society members get a quarterly journal, “Spangles”. It tells of the problems of the Leicester city fathers, confronted with “a massive winter roost” in their main park. “The roost has been growing since 1976 and is posing a serious threat to the very existence of the park,” writes Will Peach, of Leicester Polytechnic. The starlings have outwitted every attempt to move them and are now the subject of a major investigation by council officials.

By

GEOFFREY LEAN,

of the

London “Observer”