The Micronesian Starling (Aplonis opaca) is a species of starling in the Sturnidae family. It is found in Micronesia, Northern Mariana Islands, and Palau. Its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical dry forests and subtropical or tropical moist lowland forests. They are migratory bird and often seen in Malaysia during certain times of the year - November to February.
Micronesian Starlings consume fruit, seeds, the occasional insect and the eggs of seabirds. They are bold around humans and will follow humans in seabird colonies to take the eggs of seabirds flushed by them.
Sali: Still seen at Cocos and Andersen
Scientific Name: Aplonis opaca guami (Family STURNIDAE)
Common Name: Micronesian Starling
Chamorro Name: Sali
Habitat and Natural History: It lives in many habitats from seacoast limestone cliff faces to forested mountain tops and on atolls. Generally the Sali lives in groups. It is a cavity nester. A pair lays up to four eggs and both parents incubate the eggs. They are omnivorous, feeding on seeds, fruit and insects.
Description: Glossy black with a short tail and yellow eye as an adult, the Sali is about nine inches or twenty-three centimeters long.
Range: The Micronesian Starling is widely distributed in Micronesia ranging through Palau; Yap; Guam; the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (Saipan, Tinian and Rota); Chuuk; Pohnpei; and Kosrae.
Current Status: Historically on Guam the Sali was found throughout the island. It is presently restricted to Cocos Island in southern Guam and to the military housing area of Andersen Air Force Base in Northern Guam. The numbers are greatly reduced.
Threats: The most serious threat to the Sali is habitat destruction and predation by the introduced brown treesnake. The Government of Guam considers the Sali to be an endangered species.
Educational Resources
Starlings

European Starling Fun Facts
• The European Starling was introduced into North America when the "American Acclimatization Society" for European settlers released some 80-100 birds in Central Park (New York City) in 1890-91. The head of this particular organization, Eugene Scheiffelin, desired to introduce all birds ever mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare.
• Since its introduction into North America in 1891, European Starling populations have grown to over 200 million birds and they can now be found coast to coast and in Alaska.
• The European Starling, introduced to North America in 1891, has had a significant impact on our native birds. In particular, its intense competition for nesting cavities has had a negative impact on many cavity-nesting species such as Bluebirds, woodpeckers and Purple Martins.
• Rather than clamping their bill shut, starlings’ jaw muscles work to force it open giving them a great advantage when digging for grubs, worms, and bugs in the yard.
• Starlings, as members of the Sturnidae family, are cousins to the Mynah bird and are outstanding mimics. Individuals have been known to mimic the calls of up to 20 different bird species.
• Starlings have an impressive array of songs and may have a repertoire of over 60 different types.
• Starlings were at one time considered a game bird in Europe, and were hunted for food.
• Starlings often return to the same nest cavity to raise their young each year.
• Bird banding records show the longest known life-span for a Starling in North America to be over 15 years old.
• European Starlings have a highly adaptable diet and eat a wide variety of foods, such as snails, worms, millipedes, and spiders, in addition to fruits, berries, grains, and seeds.
• Starlings can play an important role in reducing the numbers of some of the major insect pests that damage farm crops.
• Starlings in the Midwestern United States migrate south in the winter, but starlings in the East tend to be year-round residents. Young birds migrate farther than older birds.
• Migrating flocks of Starlings can reach enormous numbers; flocks of 100,000 birds are not uncommon.
• The European Starling is one of only three birds not protected by the United States government. The House Sparrow and the pigeon are the other two.
Starlings are small to medium-sized passerine birds in the family Sturnidae. The name "Sturnidae" comes from the Latin word for starling, sturnus. Many Asian species, particularly the larger ones, are called mynas, and many African species are known as glossy starlings because of their iridescent plumage. Starlings occur naturally in the Old World, from Europe, Asia and Africa, to northern Australia and the islands of the tropical Pacific. Several European and Asian species have been introduced to these areas as well as North America, Hawaii and New Zealand, where they generally compete for habitat with native birds and are considered to be invasive species. The starling species familiar to most people in Europe and North America is the European Starling, and throughout much of Asia and the Pacific the Common Myna is indeed common.
Starlings have strong feet, their flight is strong and direct, and they are very gregarious. Their preferred habitat is fairly open country, and they eat insects and fruit. Several species live around human habitation, and are effectively omnivores. Many species search for prey such as grubs by "open-bill probing", that is, forcefully opening the bill after inserting it into a crevice, thus expanding the hole and exposing the prey; this behavior is referred to by the German verb zirkeln (pronounced [ˈtsɪʁkəln]).[1]
Plumage of many species is typically dark with a metallic sheen. Most species nest in holes, laying blue or white eggs.
Starlings have diverse and complex vocalizations, and have been known to embed sounds from their surroundings into their own calls, including car alarms, and human speech patterns. The birds can recognize particular individuals by their calls, and are currently the subject of research into the evolution of human language.[2] Contents * 1 Description * 2 Distribution, habitat and movements * 3 Behaviour * 3.1 Mimicry * 3.2 Diet and feeding * 4 Systematics * 4.1 Oriental-Australasian clade * 4.2 Afrotropical-Palearctic clade * 4.3 Unresolved * 5 Starlings in art * 6 References * 7 Further reading * 8 External links |
Description
The starlings are medium sized passerines.[3] The shortest-bodied species is Kenrick's Starling (Poeoptera kenricki), at 15 centimetres (6 in), but the lightest-weight species is Abbott's Starling (Poeoptera femoralis), at 34 grams (1.2 oz). The largest starlings are the mynas of the genus Mino, especially the Yellow-faced (Mino dumontii) and Long-tailed Mynas (Mino kreffti). These mynas can exceed 30 centimetres (1 ft) and weigh over 225 grams (8 oz). Several species of starling exhibit sexual dimorphism in size.
There is less sexual dimorphism in plumage however, with only 25 species showing such differences between the sexes. The plumage of the starlings is often brightly coloured due to iridescence; this colour is derived from the structure of the feathers, not from any pigment. Some species of Asian starling have crests or erectile feathers on the crest. Other ornamentation includes elongated tail feathers and brightly coloured bare areas on the face. These colours can be derived from pigments, or, as in the Bali Starling, structural colour, caused by light scattering off parallel collagen fibres. The irises of many species are red and yellow, although those of younger birds are much darker.[3]
Distribution, habitat and movements

The Chestnut-tailed Starling is a partial migrant over much of the east of its range, but its movements are poorly understood.
The starlings inhabit a wide range of habitats from the Arctic Circle to the Equator, in fact the only habitat they do not typically occupy is the driest sandy deserts. The family is naturally absent from the Americas and from large parts of Australia, but is present over the majority of Europe, Africa and Asia. The genus Aplonis has also spread widely across the islands of the Pacific reaching Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia[3] (in addition one species in the genus Mino has reached the Solomon Islands[4]), it is also a species of this genus that is the only starling found in northern Australia.[3]
Asian species are most common in evergreen forests; 39 species found in Asia are predominately forest birds as opposed to 24 found in more open or human modified environments. In contrast to this African species are more likely to be found in open woodlands and savannah; 33 species are open area specialists compared to 13 true forest species. The high diversity of species found in Asia and Africa is not matched by Europe, which has one widespread (and very common) species and two more restricted species. The European Starling is both highly widespread and extremely catholic in its habitat, occupying most types of open habitat. Like many other starling species it has also adapted readily to human-modified habitat, including farmland, orchards, plantations and urban areas.[3]
Some species of starling are migratory, either entirely, like the Shelley's Starling, which breeds in Ethiopia and northern Somalia and migrates to Kenya and southern Somalia, or the White-shouldered Starling, which is migratory in part of its range but is resident in others.[3]
Behaviour
The starlings are generally a highly social family. Most species associate in flocks of varying sizes throughout the year. A flock of starlings is called a murmuration. These flocks may include other species of starlings and sometimes species from other families. This sociality is particularly evident in the their roosting behaviour; in the non-breeding season some roosts can number in the thousands of birds.[3]

Starlings roosting in the autumn twilight, Ottawa, Canada
Mimicry
Starlings imitate a variety of avian species and have a repertoire of about 15-20 distinct imitations. They also imitate a few sounds other than those of wild birds. The calls of abundant species, calls that are simple in frequency structure and calls that show little amplitude modulation are preferentially imitated. There are local dialects of mimicked sounds.[3] Starlings have also been known to imitate objects, such as phone boxes and cars.
Diet and feeding

Micronesian Starlings have been observed feeding on the eggs of seabirds.
The diets of the starlings are usually dominated by fruits and insects. Many species are important dispersers of seeds in Asia and Africa, for example white sandalwood, Indian Banyan. In addition to trees they are also important dispersers of parasitic mistletoes. In South Africa the Red-winged Starling is an important disperser of the introduced Acacia cyclops. Starlings have been observed feeding on fermenting over-ripe fruit, which led to the speculation that they might become intoxicated by the alcohol.[3] Laboratory experiments on European Starlings have found that they have disposal enzymes that allow them to break down alcohol very quickly.[5] In addition to consuming fruits, many starlings will also consume nectar. The extent to which starlings are important pollinators is unknown, but at least some are, such as the Slender-billed Starling of alpine East Africa, which pollinates giant lobelias.[3]
Systematics
The starlings belong to the superfamily Muscicapoidea, together with thrushes, flycatchers and chats, as well as dippers which are quite distant and Mimidae (thrashers and mockingbirds). The latter are apparently the Sturnidae's closest living relatives, replace them in the Americas, and have a rather similar but more solitary lifestyle. They are morphologically quite similar too—a partly albinistic specimen of a mimid, mislabelled as to suggest an Old World origin, was for many decades believed to represent an extinct starling (see Rodrigues Starling for details).

European Starling eggs
The oxpeckers are sometimes placed here as a subfamily, but the weight of evidence has shifted towards granting them full family status as a more basal member of the Sturnidae-Mimidae group, derived from an early expansion into Africa.
Usually the starlings are considered a family, as is done here. Sibley & Monroe (1990) included the mimids in the family and demoted the starlings to tribe rank, as Sturnini. This treatment was used by Zuccon et al. (2006). However, the grouping of Sibley & Monroe (besides leaving the subfamily rank vacant[verification needed]) is overly coarse due to methodological drawbacks of their DNA-DNA hybridization technique and most of their proposed revisions of taxonomic rank have not been accepted (see for example Ciconiiformes). The all-inclusive Sturnidae grouping is all but noninformative as regards biogeography, and obscures the evolutionary distinctness of the three lineages. Establishing a valid name for the clade consisting of Sibley/Monroe's "pan-Sturnidae" would nonetheless be desirable to contrast them with the other major lineages of Muscicapoidea.
Starlings probably originated in the general area of the East Asia, perhaps towards the southwestern Pacific, as evidenced by the number of plesiomorphic lineages to occur there. Expansion into Africa appears to have occurred later, as most derived forms are found there. An alternative scenario would be African origin for the entire "sturnoid" (as per Zuccon et al. 2006) group, with the oxpeckers representing an ancient relict and the mimids arriving in South America. This is contradicted by the North American distribution of the most basal Mimidae.(Cibois & Cracraft 2004, Zuccon et al. 2006)
As the fossil record is limited to quite Recent forms, the proposed Early Miocene (about 25–20 mya) divergence dates for the "sturnoids" lineages must be considered extremely tentative. Given the overall evidence for origin of most Passeri families in the first half of the Miocene, it appears to be not too far off the mark however.(Zuccon et al. 2006)
Recent studies (Cibois & Cracraft 2004, Zuccon et al. 2006) identified two major clades of this family, corresponding to the generally drab, often striped, largish "atypical mynas" and other mainly Asian-Pacific lineages, and the often smaller, sometimes highly apomorphic taxa which are most common in Africa and the Palearctic, usually have metallic coloration, and in a number of species also bright carotinoid plumage colors on the underside. Inside this latter group, there is a clade consisting of species which, again, are usually not too brightly-colored, and which consists of the "typical" myna-Sturnus assemblage.
Interestingly, the Philippine creepers, a single genus of three species of treecreeper-like birds appear to be highly apomorphic members of the more initial radiation of the Sturnidae (Zuccon et al. 2006). While this may seem odd at first glance, their placement has always been contentious. In addition, biogeography virtually rules out a close relationship of Philippine creepers and treecreepers, as neither the latter nor their close relatives seem have ever reached the Wallacea, let alone the Philippines. Nonetheless, their inclusion in the Sturnidae is not entirely final and eventually they may remain a separate family.
Genus sequence follows traditional treatments. This is apparently not entirely correct, with Scissirostrum closer to Aplonis than to Gracula for example, and Acridotheres among the most advanced genera. Too few taxa have already been studied as regards their relationships however, and thus a change in sequence has to wait.
The review by Lovette & Rubenstein (2008) is the most recent work on the phylogeny of the group.[6]
Visually Sexing A Starling Male Starling

This method is only an indication of gender, and is not 100 percent accurate.Look at your bird's eye in sunlight, with magnification (if necessary) so that your eye is no more than 10" away from the bird's. The camera flash exaggerated the brightness of the male's mottled iris; it will be just barely lighter than the dark pupil. (The camera is also sensitive to near-ultraviolet, which starlings see, but our eyes can't. This makes the male's iris look lighter than it would appear to us.)
Female Starling

Photographs courtesy of Bill Lee The female's iris ring IS visible to our eyes as separate from the pupil. It has boundaries that are a little more sharp than shown, and its line thickness changes as the eye adjusts to changing light.The bird (in the front) in the picture below is a DNA sexed male, but has the brown eye ring.
Photograph courtesy of Jennifer Between 3 and 7 percent of non-juvenile starlings have conflicting iris and bill color characteristics. [Pyle, P. 2001. Identification Guide to North American Birds] The photo below shows an example of an adult male starling (Piper) singing with the hackle feathers raised. |

Photograph courtesy of Jill SohaSome additional ways of sexing a starling: * By the length of the hackle feathers. (See photo above.) Measuring only the iridescent portion of these feathers under the throat, adult males have the longest (11mm) adult females and first year birds the shortest (5.5-11mm). (Kessel 1951) * For birds in breeding condition, shown by a yellow bill, the base of the lower mandible is bluish or blue-gray in males, and pinkish in females. * Under wing coverts are very dark or black in adult males and brown or gray in females, but this can vary among individuals. (Suthers 1978) * Males are heavier than females. Estimates of normal male mass is 73-96 grams, females average 69-93 grams. (Hicks 1934, Blem 1981) |