Have you ever been outside and saw a huge flock of black birds? They take over the trees, rooftops, and can easily change the scenery into a homage to a Hitchcock movie. Most of all, they tend to make a rather unpleasant chattering, squabbling sound.

Meet the Starling.

This bird is one who can call the entire world home, as many of its species or subspecies can be found in just about every continent. However, it is not a native to some of them. For those that live in North America, you can thank Eugene Schieffelin for introducing them to the states.

As a member of the Acclimation Society of North America, this guy was attempting to introduce every single bird ever mentioned in all the works by William Shakespeare to our country; native or not. Who knew that his introduction of 60 – 100 birds in Central Park in 1890 would expand to a population of over 200 million today. Methinks they may have taken some breeding lessons from rabbits or mice…

A lot of people don’t take too kindly to these birds, mainly because of the damage they cause and the noise they make. Personally, I think they are a bit strange, but not much to get overly irked about since they do  migrate from one place to the  next rather quickly. For more information on these rather loud birds, look them up on wikipedia.

Tags: bird, black bird, common starling, european starling, migration, noisy bird, starling

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 1:13 am and is filed under animals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.