COUNTRY LIFE
Starlings : Increase or Decrease ?
My recent remarks on the possible decrease in the population of starlings has brought me an extremely interesting pamphlet reprinted by Miss Jane Meiklejohn from the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society. Unfortunately, this paper, in spite of an admirably detailed analysis of starling roosts, movements and the various figures obtained by the experimental census of 1938, was completed too early to include any discussion of the results of the great frost of early 1940. The most popular and frequently repeated assertion about the starling is that it is increasing rather than decreasing in numbers. Only a census taken over a period of years can decide this ; Miss Meiklejohn, however, refers to an inexplicable and sensational increase in the numbers of British starlings between 5840 and 189o, when starlings began to take up residence and breed in localities where they had hitherto been known as rare birds. Bewick, who died in 1828, apparently cherished a hope that starlings would nest in his house, but the hope remained unfulfilled. Miss Meiklejohn quotes Yarrall (4th ed., 1882) as one of the references describing this increase ; yet my own copy of Yarrall, which is dated 1843, contains what is evidently the same reference, describing starlings as congregating " in millions." It seems scarcely possible that a bird that was fairly uncommon before 1840 should have become " very numerous as a species, and pretty generally distributed " by 1843. Hewitson, in 1846, and Morris, in 1860, both refer to enormous congregations of starlings, especially near the sea coast, as if they were no new phenomenon. It seems quite likely, therefore, that the sensational increase to which Miss Meiklejohn refers began to take place before rather than after 1840.
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