There’s a new bird in town with a brown body, faint stripes on his brown chest, black beak, black eye, and a little black mask.
What is he? A juvenile starling.
He’s confusing because he’s not in the bird guide unless you know to look for starlings. He doesn’t look like his parents but his behavior is the same as theirs. The big hint to his identify, if he’s still at the begging stage, is that he won’t leave his parents alone.
You can hear him begging, “Churrrr, churrrr, churrrr.”
Click here for a story about him that I wrote in 2010.
(photo from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original.)
They can be very tame at this stage.
I have several of these in my yard, are they starlings?
If they look to like the photo they are juvenile starlings.
We have a birdbath in our backyard and a cage around our vegie garden to keep the birds and squirrels out. Yesterday late afternoon, early evening, there were up to 20 of these brown birds that we had never seen before. They were on the cage, hanging from the side of the cage, on the ground and in the birdbath. At one time, there were 9 of these bird in the birdbath! We had never seen that many birds in there before! We looked in a bird book to try to identify and could not find anything. It took my daughter about an hour on the internet when she came across your blog. And there they were, the brown birds were juvenile starlings. And they were treating our backyard as a swimming pool and playground. It was fun to watch them play with each other just like any other group of kids on the jungle gym (cage) and small pool.