Starlings as shorebirds

Starlings as shorebirds

As a marine biologist, who is also a birder, and who has worked a lot in intertidal areas I have regularly come across ‘trespassing landbirds’, that act as shorebirds. There are of course a few specialists also here, such as a number of Cinclodes species in South America, Cobb’s Wren in the Falklands and the Rock Pipit here in Europe; also our Hooded Crow acts as a regular shorebird much of the time here in Northern Norway. And when we have a sudden return of winter weather late in spring, as happens here now and then, and fresh snow covers much of the ground, lots of passerines flee to the intertidal and feed there; I have written on such occasions in a Norwegian journal.

But Starlings (and also wagtails) are in an in-between position. They are not regular shorebirds, but still exploit shore ressources quite regularly. Most of my examples come from Holland and western Norway, where I lived earlier, but also here north we find starlings regularly in the intertidal, and the few that try to winter in the outermost islands here north, mostly keep to the shore most of the time.

When I was a student in Holland (terribly long ago by now) we had every summer a summercamp called ‘ Shore birds and bottomfauna’ on the island of Vlieland in the Wadden Sea, where many budding ornithologists (several later famous names there) came together to study the diet and feeding habits of the different shorebirds, while I was the bottom fauna man, who was supposed to know all the animals in the mudflats, as well as the tracks they left on the surface. One of these tracks was made by the large polychaete worm Nereis diversicolor, a small hole with a network of tracks radiating from it. And I soon found out that the local starlings knew these tracks as well as I did and walked from one to the next, trying to extract the ragworms (I have later seen Spotless Starlings in NW Spain do exactly the same).

Starlings also came and collected the debris on the shrimp-boats in the harbour of Den Helder, where I lived at the time. And later, in the Sognefjord in Western Norway , where at the time there was a large seasonal Sprat Clupea sprattus fishery, where these small fishes were for a while kept in large holding nets in the fjord, with some mortality, starlings cruised like small helicopters over the surface and picked up the floating corpses.

The most shore-bird like behaviour I ave seen in starlings was also in the Sognefjord, although further inland, in late summer. Here starlings foraged in the intertidal at ebbtide, and in fact caught the amphipods I was studying at the time, as I suspect they do quite regularly many places. But what was very special this time, in my eyes, was that when the flood came and the intertidal no longer was accessible to shorebirds, the starlings sat in long rows on the telephone wires along the road, and rested, exactly as real shorebirds do at high tide!

Starlings are highly interesting birds, just because they are generalists and always open to new possibilities, and exhibit new behavioural traits.