Starlings

A sighting of maybe 10-20 of them swinging around to the east of our house, early yesterday evening. Dark, middle sized birds, flying in burst of flapping then glide for a bit mode. Trajectories rather like those of fly catching swifts and swallows, although the rather thin write up on the RSPB website suggests that starlings do not catch flies. With the glide part very like the snap above, with tail spread wide. So I think starlings are confirmed, not a bird we see around our house very often, although there are a few trees in the vicinity where they congregate, for example in Longmead Road.

This snap from an ecology club or lab at Vassar College, once a ladies' college, roughly equivalent, I think, to our own Girton College, not far from where I lived as a child. The 106 bus which I used to catch to school used to turn around and wait for the off just outside the southern corner of their grounds, a place quite reasonably known as Girton Corner and visible from my bus stop at the entrance to Thornton Road.

Rather more scenic location though, between New York and Albany, just outside Ploughkeepsie on the Hudson River.

Reference 1: https://pages.vassar.edu/sensoryecology/european-starling/.

Reference 2: https://pages.vassar.edu/sensoryecology/.

Reference 3: https://www.vassar.edu/.