The Truth about Starlings

Mom and I were sitting in the back yard the other night after supper, listening to the birds. I pulled out my phone and showed her Merlin, which will help identify birds from their song.The app identified two birds, song sparrows and European starlings:We got curious: if the starlings were European starlings, how did they get to Charlottetown.I asked Claude, and received a definitive sounding answer:The European starling (Sturnus vulgaris) is the starling you see throughout North America, introduced in the 1890s when about 100 birds were released in Central Park. So when people say “American starling,” they usually just mean the same European starling that’s now extremely common across the continent.Claude went on to report this as an environmental tale:Whatever his reasons, the releases happened in 1890 and 1891, and the birds thrived spectacularly — today there are estimated to be around 200 million European starlings in North America, making it one of the most consequential…