Tall trees with large clusters of dishevelled nests and crowds of birds gabbling without letup; it’s a sight to behold in northern Queensland. The birds are Metallic Starlings, the only member of the large Sturnidae family that is native to Australia.
Sometimes earlier called the whirlwind bird, they breed in large colonies along the coast and in adjacent lowlands from northern Cape York southward to the area around Mackay. They are summer migrants from New Guinea, arriving in Australia to breed from July and departing in February or March. While not chattering at their nests they often fly in large noisy flocks, sometimes of thousands, to feed. They forage in fruit trees, including native nutmeg; they also take nectar and insects, including caterpillars. They can sometimes be seen wheeling in large groups above their roosting sites.
Adults are black with an iridescent green and purple sheen, long pointed tails and prominent bright red eyes. Juveniles are brown above and white underneath with brown streaking.
Their breeding colonies can have several hundred nests in a single tree; up to 400 nests have been reported. Whenever I have seen them it has seemed like every bird in the colony was shouting all at once, what HANZAB describes as ‘incessant high pitched twittering and chattering, sometimes deafening’.1 Tim Low wrote that any tree they roost in ‘becomes like a crowded country hall in which everyone chatters and no one listens. … Being poorly built and crowded together, the nests often fall out. No other bird I know of does so badly from sudden gusts and snapping limbs’2. He points out that Metallic Starlings evolved recently from other black starlings, which look nearly the same but nest in crevices rather than on branches. He speculates on why Metallic Starlings turned to building nests on branches: it was to overcome a shortage of cavities; they retained the messy starling nests but moved them from cavities to branches. Low says that being recent arrivals in Australia (‘one of a small number of passerid songbirds that “returned” to Australia’) they have not yet perfected the art of building nests on branches. The nests are large and pendulous with an entrance at the side, made from vines, leaves, palm fronds, and other fibrous materials, and can be anywhere from 10 to 30 m above the ground. There can be up to four eggs and there may be several broods in a season.
A video recording from the same time shows the murmuration in more detail.
There are five subspecies of Metallic Starling; only the subspecies metallica breeds in Australia, other subspecies remaining in the islands around New Guinea. The closely related Singing Starling occurs in New Guinea and has recently established on the small Australian islands Boigu and Saibai just off the PNG coast. The genus Aplonis contains 24 species (AviList 2025), scattered throughout South-east Asia and the islands around New Guinea. John Gould originally named the genus Aplornis, meaning ‘plain bird’, in 1836. Two weeks later he incorrectly wrote Aplonis, which means nothing. Despite objections from some, including Christidis and Boles,3 this name has stuck.
References
- Higgins, PJ, JM Peter, & SJ Cowling (2006) Handbook of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic Birds, Vol. 7, p. 1896. Oxford University Press, Melbourne.
- Low, Tim (2014) Where Song Began, p. 194-5. Penguin, Melbourne.
- Christidis, Les & Walter E. Boles (2008) Systematics and Taxonomy of Australian Birds, p. 208. CSIRO Publishing, Victoria.
