Dark-feathered birds that often gather in enormous flocks known as 'murmurations', and whose plumage gains whitish speckles in late summer and autumn. The autumn indeed is the only time starlings specifically appear in the tales of the Third Age, when flocks of them joined many other kinds of birds flying northward toward Erebor and Lake-town after the downfall of Smaug the Dragon.
Though not otherwise directly described, it is clear that starlings were known far to the west of Erebor, at least as far as the borders of the Shire. Tom Bombadil, whose house was in this region, worked the name of the bird into at least one fragment of his nonsense poetry (as a convenient rhyme for 'darling'), and was also capable of making the whistling sound of the starling.
Notes
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There are more than a hundred different species of starlings around the world, but the common or European starling Sturnus vulgaris is the only kind regularly found in the British Isles, where it is extremely common. This dark-feathered, speckled bird would therefore have been the kind that Tolkien had in mind when he wrote about the flocking starlings of northern Middle-earth.
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- Updated 14 July 2024
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