Common Starling

The English Starling population crashed around 90% between 1966 and 2012 which resulted in red status. A lack of breeding holes appears to be part of the problem. The Lincolnshire population has also been hard hit. BBS data shows that the Lincolnshire breeding population has significantly fallen by 55% during the period 1994-2019.  Whereas the Atlas estimated a population of 60,000 pairs we probably now have half that number. The good news is that the population appears to have stabilised to some degree and there is little change in the incidence of breeding Starlings across Lincolnshire over the last 10 years. The problems here are not replicated across Europe so we still receive a large influx of wintering birds that provide the pre-roost murmuration spectacles that are so popular with the public and birders alike. More than 1,500,000 Starlings have been ringed in the UK and there are many recoveries of wintering birds being recovered far to the east in the Baltic countries, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia.