Starlings are common enough around here, but when I was cycling around Montana summer of ‘19 I was bummed to see so many starlings on fields and pastures with broods of fledged young.
What makes starlings deadly to native songbirds in fights is that they have long, strong legs for running on the ground and perching feet that grasp. That and they feed by jamming their beak into the dirt and grass roots and then opening the beak a little to look for insects so exposed. So they have a strong pointed beak with eyes placed to look right down the beak where they’re hitting. Pairs even team up to rob woodpeckers of their nesting cavities.
In the absence of starlings we have cavity-nesting tree swallows, purple martins and bluebirds. Over in the Old World the swallows build their own mud nests (the ancestors of our own barn and cliff swallows) and their bluebird-equivalent, the Eurasian Robin (about the size of our bluebirds) likewise build their own nest, avoiding competition with starlings.
