STARLING: a lucky escape from depths of my kitchen wall

STARLINGS have always struck me as the bird-table equivalent of human muggers - brash, noisy, bullying, and usually descending in a gang.

On countless occasions I have watched them muscle in en masse to establish their own pecking order when food is laid out.

Most garden birds take fright and give way to them immediately, although I've seen the odd brave blackbird fight back and drive them off.

Not the prettiest of birds, the starling nevertheless boasts glossy feathers which can look quite stunning when they catch the light.

Drab grey-browns are then suddenly suffused by rich blues, purples, and greens.

Quite a large bird at 22cms length, the starling is omniverous, feeding on caterpillars, worms, and insects, as well as fruit, seeds and household scraps.

Lacking a distinct song itself, it still produces an amazing variety of rattles and whistles, even mimicking other birds when the mood takes it.

Common throughout the country, starlings sometimes gather in huge flocks during winter.

On a few occasions, up to a million birds have been estimated at giant roosts that have left local trees and buildings devastated.

Last summer, I had two encounters with starlings at my home, one happy and one rather sad.

Both incidents involved holes located beneath the guttering on opposite sides of the house.

Birds have roosted and nested in these ever since we came to live here. The first incident occurred after starlings made a nest as usual in the larger of these holes.

This year, however, they somehow broke through to the recess between the house's outer and inner walls with tragic results.

A luckless fledgling tumbled down into the darkness after its siblings had safely left the nest.

For two days, the mother starling frantically tracked its doomed offspring with an unremitting series of heartbreakling cries, all weakly returned by the terrified younger bird.

There was little I could do except hope that it found its way back up to the spot where it had slipped through.

At one point, the fledgling briefly appeared behind an ivy-covered stone air vent set mid-way up the outside wall.

But before I could work out how to break this or prise it off, the prisoner was gone again.

Short of smashing down the entire wall, nothing could be done.

Eventually, by the third day, its pathetic calls had petered out altogether. So upsetting was all this that I asked a builder working on a neighbour's house to seal up the hole so nothing similar could happen again.

Bizarrely, two weeks later, an almost exact repeat occurred, this time involving an adult starling and the smaller hole on the opposite side of the house, by now probably enlarged to make a decent sized nest site.

This time, the victim had managed to get itself caught between the inner and outer kitchen walls, a fact I only discovered when I was alone in the house one morning and about to go to work.

Putting down my case, I finally traced its scuffling progress to a patch of wall inside a large kitchen cupboard.

I grabbed a hammer and screwdriver then tried to knock a hole through to it.

No success.

But just as I was contemplating the dismal death of a second starling, I discovered a plastic air vent set into the wall behind the metal central heating box.

Tearing this off in a moment, I stood back and kept as quiet as possible. Light had obviously flooded into the trapped bird's position because, after only a few seconds, a beak, then a dusty little head, popped out of the cupboard wall.

At this, I gingerly opened the kitchen window and stepped further away. As I did, a filthy starling shot out of the cupboard like a rocket, did a slight mid-air flight correction over the sink, then clattered out through the window.

It settled on the nearest garden bush where I watched it shaking and cleaning its feathers for the next two minutes.

After that, with a triumphant chatter and whistle, it flew off.

Job well done, I thought.