PSA: Know Your Starlings

And your Grackles. This is currently on exhibit at Brooklyn Bridge Park’s Photo Wall. These not-grackles are in fact European Starlings (Sturnus vulgaris). Mortimer!

For Common Grackle (Quiscalus quiscula), see here. For Boat-tailed Grackle (Q.major), hang out at Jamaica Bay and you might get lucky. For Great-tailed Grackle (Q. mexicanus), try the Southwest US and Mexico.

Ornithological literacy: it’s a terrible thing to see it abused.

It was interesting to come across both Starlings and House Sparrows, two of the most common species in NYC, in their native land during my two weeks in Britain. I didn’t see that many of them. Indeed, hard as it is to believe from our perspective, the House Sparrow is declining (well, all birds are declining, but some more so) in the UK.