Rose-coloured Starlings: from Christmas Pie to Oman.

I have always enjoyed seeing Rose-coloured Starlings. Their bright pink and black plumage, the contrast with our Common Starlings and even their name, seems exotic and foreign. I saw my first bird in November 1987 in the wonderfully named Surrey village of Christmas Pie. My notes, taken as a feisty 17-year-old, are critical of how bright Rose-coloured Starlings appear in field guides compared to the dull bird that I was watching in Surrey in November. The distinction between their bright summer plumage and their dull winter feathering was clearly lost on me, as I watched the bird, somewhat disappointed.

I now know that in winter Rose-coloured Starlings lose their glossy black tones, especially on the head, where dull grey-pink feathering appears. The bill also changes colour from a sharply demarked black and pink, to a more uniform thrush-like yellow:

In the summer of 2002 I saw two different summer plumaged birds, one at Happisburgh in Norfolk and one at Dawlish Warren in Devon. Both birds were distant, but the Dawlish bird was memorably so. I found myself in the hide at Dawlish with a Yorkshireman, who had moved to Cape May. Richard Crossley went on to produce the photo guides to North American birds that bear his name. Richard was good company and as we chatted a report of a long-staying adult Rose-coloured Starling came through. It was on view on the roof of “the pink house in Starcross” some 1.3 miles (2.25km) distant across the estuary. We trained our ‘scopes on Starcross, found the pink house and were delighted to make out the (absolutely tiny) pink-and-black bird sitting on the tiles of the roof over a mile away! It is still probably the smallest bird that I have seen in the UK.

My next record of Rose-coloured Starling was a juvenile bird in early September 2003 on Lundy. This was a special moment for me as it was the first rarity that I had found in the UK and it was also my birthday. It is a double that I can recommend. Later that same month I saw another juvenile bird at Kelling Water Meadows in Norfolk, before a period of eight Rose-coloured Starlingless years began. This rosé drought was broken in style, by the appearance of two juvenile birds on Lundy at the same time in October 2011. One bird was even feeding in the very same field that I found my first juvenile bird in, eight years beforehand:

Juvenile Rose-coloured Starlings are not rose-coloured. They are the colour of the desert sand and rock where the adults breed in noisy colonies in the countries around the Caspian Sea. In flight the pale rump stands out, but perched they have none of the dramatic colour tones of summer plumaged adults:

Juveniles seem to vary a bit in their plumage tones. One of the two birds present in October 2011 was strikingly pale:

My next experience of the Rosy Pastor was in Oman in November 2015. Here the adults were in their dull pink winter plumage, but now I could appreciate their subtle tones and their funky undertail covert markings:

The adult summer plumaged bird that I saw yesterday in East Challow, Oxfordshire, was the 9th Rose-coloured Starling that I have seen in the UK, but the first summer plumaged adult since the Norfolk and Dawlish birds of 2002. It perched up on a telephone wire with the light behind it, but those pink and black tones still stood out:

I’m still waiting for really good views of an adult summer bird, but its good to have something to look forward to.