Early Sunday morning hundreds of Starlings descended on my lawn/green stuff and madly started pecking.

Who knew that my lawn/green stuff could provide a gourmet meal for Starlings.

They would peck madly, fly off in a swarm, and then come back and peck madly again. The lawn would suddenly turn speckled, dark grey. But, I guess they’ve moved on, because I haven’t seen them since.

When I lived on the island (Plum Island) Starlings would descend this time of year onto trees that had berries on them. Well, that made sense, but my frozen solid lawn? Gourmet, yummy stuff? Got me.

I just assumed they were Starlings. But I thought since I was going to talk about them on the Newburyport Blog, that maybe I better make sure, well as sure as possible, that the fact that they could be Starlings, and not some other bird.

And it wasn’t very hard to find flock of Starling stuff on the World Wide Web. And sure enough, my trusted friend Wikipedia had info on Starlings.

Starlings, just like the one’s on my lawn.
Daniel Plazanet (Daplaza)
Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike

And I found out a very cool thing about Starlings.

“All the European Starlings in North America descended from 100 birds released in New York’s Central Park in the early 1890s. A group dedicated to introducing America to all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s works set the birds free. Today, European Starlings range from Alaska to Florida and northern Mexico, and their population is estimated at over 200 million birds.”
(www.birds.cornell.edu)

That’s a heck of a lot of birds. And just a bunch came and visited me briefly, pecking madly.

Mary Eaton
Nwburyport