When the starlings align

There they are again, garrulous, taunting and goading until my forehead knits with a frown.
Have a misread their motive? Is their song mere welcome to the day and encouragement for me to join it? Or is it provocation, as I read it?
By day they sit and murmur in the tree, or flock to pasture where they grub for worms. Each evening, right on dusk, they swarm above the lake in a great, amorphous mass to intrigue me and beguile. At night they sit and scheme at roost. And now this morn, as every other recent, they call me out and rattle at the ball of wire thrust in the hole beneath the eave where they wish to nest.
They work with patience. There are no cross words, just determined hints and whistles as the obstruction is once more worried from its place.
They will not succeed. I told them so, many times, that I no longer want starlings nesting in my roof space. They are noisy and smelly, dirty, lice-infested birds that rightly belong in a hollowed tree or a distant cave, at the old quarry where nobody goes or anywhere else but here.
But no, these are determined birds. I heard them scraping, scratching at the tiles, tapping first thing at the window in the pretense of hunting spiders, while telling me if they do not have their nesting hole nor shall I have sleep.
They have vocabulary, I’ll give them that. Never have I known such whistling, shrieking and squawking, or such variety of musical disability. And what marvelous mimics they are – so good, in fact, that I dare not tell them what I really think for fear they repeat it to the neighbours and my reputation further be diminished.
We see starlings each evening in that mesmerising, swirling flock, and once used to the spectacle learn to keep out from under it, in the knowledge that such murmurations give the birds opportunity to empty their bowels. Perhaps this behaviour prevents them from soiling their roost by night. Starlings have capacious bowels, by the way, and make excellent marksmen, peppering perceived threats with such a salvo of foul-smelling guano that lessons are swiftly learned and dry-cleaners kept in business.
The Latin name is Sturnus vulgaris. Vulgaris I can understand, or thought I could. It actually means common, and there was a time that the European starling was one of our most frequently encountered birds.
The European population of these birds has been in decline for decades, the local Irish population less so. Still, the reduction in their numbers is noticeable. Indeed, in the United Kingdom, the once ubiquitous starling has made its unimaginable way onto the RSPBs Red List of Birds of Conservation Concern.
Given everything already said, you might think we should be glad they are in trouble. But no, despite my grumbling I do have a fondness for my vulgar visitors.
Just look at their colours, for instance. Seen at any kind of distance they appear no more than nearly black. But close at hand, why, I don’t believe we have a prettier bird in all the land. Starling plumage in spring finery is a sheen of purple and green, apart from those flecks of delicate cream that mark the whole bird apart from wings and tail.
And the courtship song of the male is nothing short of remarkable. Yes, he has moments of discordance, sometimes long ones, but in imitation he has no peer, in this part of the world at least.
One moment he sings thrush-like, the next he has me reaching for my phone or wondering where that distant croaking might be from.
I really rather like them. Just not nesting in the house.
Nor am I the only one who likes to see starlings about the place. Birdwatch Ireland’s journal ‘Irish Birds’ (Volume 7, number 4) carried a report into a 15-year study on the diet of hen harriers in Northern Ireland, the bulk of which consisted of three species of small bird: the meadow pipit, the skylark and the starling.
Both meadow pipit and skylark have become scarce in many parts; the hen harrier more so – just a hundred pairs of these powerful raptors remain in the entire country.
The starling, then, in providing for our rare hen harrier, has greater value than I thought. While I still don’t want them in my roof I think a nesting box is in order. We shall do what we can.

Michael Kingdon, a naturalist and keen fisherman, lives on the shores of Lough Carra.