The European starling is native to Europe, Asia, and North Africa, where it has lived for thousands of years across a range stretching from the British Isles to western Siberia and down into the Mediterranean. The roughly 200 million starlings now found outside that native range, including an estimated 93 million in North America alone, descend from intentional introductions made during the 19th century.
Native Range
In its homeland, the European starling thrives across a vast swath of the Old World. It breeds throughout most of Europe, from Scandinavia and Iceland south to the Mediterranean coast, and extends eastward through temperate Asia. Populations also occupy parts of North Africa. Within this enormous range, starlings occupy farmland, open woodland, parks, and cities, anywhere they can find short grass for foraging and holes in trees or buildings for nesting. Some northern populations migrate south for winter, while birds in milder climates stay put year-round.
How Starlings Reached North America
On March 6, 1890, a New York drug manufacturer named Eugene Schieffelin released 60 European starlings into Central Park. The popular story is that Schieffelin was on a mission to introduce every bird species mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays to the United States. Recent scholarship from Duke University Press suggests that his role in the starling’s success has been overstated and that the Shakespeare obsession may be entirely fabricated. What is clear is that Schieffelin belonged to a broader 19th-century movement, sometimes called “acclimatization,” that saw value in transplanting useful or familiar European species to new continents.
His release was not even the first attempt. Others had tried and failed to establish starlings in North America before him. In May 1889, 20 pairs were released in Portland, Oregon, but that colony never took hold. Schieffelin’s Central Park birds, however, found conditions to their liking. They survived the winter, bred successfully, and began spreading outward from New York City.
Spread Across the Continent
From that single foothold in Manhattan, starlings moved outward at a remarkable pace. By 1928, just 38 years after the release, a U.S. Department of Agriculture survey documented them from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River. A small flock had already appeared near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, by December 1921. The USDA report predicted that if starlings managed to cross the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, they would reach the Pacific, and that is exactly what happened over the following decades.
Today, European starlings range from Alaska to Mexico. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology estimates the North American population at about 93 million birds, all descended from those few dozen released in Central Park. That expansion, covering an entire continent in roughly a century, makes the starling one of the most successful biological invasions in recorded history.
Why They Spread So Successfully
Several biological traits made starlings almost perfectly suited to colonize new territory. They are extreme dietary generalists, probing the ground for insect larvae, feeding on above-ground invertebrates, and readily switching to fruit, grain, and garbage when those are available. This flexibility means they can find food in nearly any habitat, from rural farmland to city sidewalks.
Starlings are also cavity nesters that are not picky about where they set up home. Tree holes, gaps in building eaves, traffic lights, and nest boxes all work. They breed quickly, typically raising one or two broods per year, and they are aggressive enough to evict other birds from prime nesting spots. Their tendency to form enormous flocks outside the breeding season, sometimes numbering in the hundreds of thousands, helps them exploit patchy food sources and overwhelm local ecosystems.
Impact on Native Birds
The trait that causes the most ecological damage is that nest-site aggression. Starlings compete directly with native cavity-nesting species for a limited supply of tree holes. A U.S. Forest Service study documented starlings usurping nests and destroying eggs belonging to at least five native species, including western bluebirds, oak titmice, ash-throated flycatchers, and acorn woodpeckers. Some of these birds fight back: acorn woodpeckers mounted coordinated group attacks with up to seven individuals diving at a starling model placed near their nests. But individual defense is often not enough against a species that outnumbers most native competitors by orders of magnitude.
Purple martins, red-headed woodpeckers, and other hole-nesting species have also experienced population pressure in areas where starling densities are high. Because starlings begin scouting nest sites early in spring, they often claim cavities before migratory native species return.
Agricultural and Economic Costs
Starlings cause significant financial damage beyond their ecological effects. The USDA estimates that starlings, blackbirds, and crows together cause more than $150 million per year in direct losses to grain, fruit, and berry crops in the United States. Starlings are a major contributor to that total, particularly in winter when massive flocks descend on cattle feedlots and dairy operations. These flocks consume and contaminate livestock feed and may help transmit diseases between farms.
Winter roosts in urban areas also create problems. Thousands of starlings congregating on buildings produce noise, droppings that damage structures, and potential health concerns from fungal spores in accumulated waste.
Introductions Beyond North America
The United States was far from the only destination. During the same 19th-century acclimatization movement, European starlings were intentionally released in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and several other countries. In New Zealand, the birds became firmly established, and genetic research published in 2024 confirmed that some New Zealand populations received additional birds translocated from Australian colonies, broadening the genetic base and likely boosting their ability to adapt. In Australia, starlings spread across the eastern states and are now the target of active containment efforts to prevent them from reaching Western Australia’s grain belt.
Across all these introduced ranges, the pattern is strikingly similar: a small founding population, rapid expansion fueled by dietary flexibility and aggressive nesting behavior, and lasting consequences for native wildlife and agriculture.