Starlings are small to medium-sized passerine (perching) birds known for the often dark, glossy iridescent sheen of their plummage; their complex vocalizations including mimicing; and their distinctive, often elaborate swarming behavior, known as murmuration.

Their preferred habitat is fairly open country, they eat insects and fruit, and most species nest in holes and lay blue or white eggs.

[1] Starlings have diverse and complex vocalizations and have been known to embed sounds from their surroundings into their own calls, including car alarms and human speech patterns.

The family is naturally absent from the Americas and from large parts of Australia, but it is present over the majority of Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Like many other starling species, it has also adapted readily to human-modified habitat, including farmland, orchards, plantations, and urban areas.

[6] A persistent story alleges that Eugene Schieffelin, chairman of the American Acclimatization Society, decided all birds mentioned by William Shakespeare should be in North America, leading to the introduction of the starling to the U.S.; however, this claim is more fiction than fact.

[9] The sharp pushing, pulling, diving, pulsating and swooping of the flock in response to the individual movements may confuse and discourage predators such as falcons, providing a collective protection.

The scientists used a computer simulation to determine that each bird synchronized with its seven closest neighbors, creating overlapping groups that communicated their movements — focusing on three simple parameters: attraction, repulsion and angular alignment.

[10] In Denmark, where murmurations have been estimated to involve a million starlings, the phenomenon is called the Black Sun, or Sort sol in Danish.

[14] In Ireland, starlings’ numbers are boosted during winter, as migrating flocks arrive from breeding grounds around Western Europe and Scandinavia.

[16][17] The starlings belong to the superfamily Muscicapoidea, together with thrushes, flycatchers and chats, as well as dippers, which are quite distant relatives, and Mimidae (thrashers and mockingbirds).

The oxpeckers are sometimes placed here as a subfamily, but the weight of evidence has shifted towards granting them full family status as a more basal member of the Sturnidae-Mimidae group, derived from an early expansion into Africa.

This treatment was used by Zuccon et al.[19] However, the grouping of Sibley & Monroe is overly coarse due to methodological drawbacks of their DNA-DNA hybridization technique and most of their proposed revisions of taxonomic rank have not been accepted (see for example Ciconiiformes).

Establishing a valid name for the clade consisting of Sibley/Monroe's "pan-Sturnidae" would nonetheless be desirable to contrast them with the other major lineages of Muscicapoidea.

Starlings probably originated in the general area of East Asia, perhaps towards the southwestern Pacific, as inferred by the number of plesiomorphic lineages to occur there.

An alternative scenario would be African origin for the entire "sturnoid" group,[19] with the oxpeckers representing an ancient relict and the mimids arriving in South America.

[19][20] As the fossil record is limited to quite Recent forms, the proposed Early Miocene (about 25–20 Mya) divergence dates for the "sturnoids" lineages must be considered extremely tentative.

[19] As of 2007,[update] recent studies[19][20] identified two major clades of this family, corresponding to the generally drab, often striped, largish "atypical mynas" and other mainly Asian-Pacific lineages, and the often smaller, sometimes highly apomorphic taxa which are most common in Africa and the Palearctic, usually have metallic coloration, and in a number of species also bright carotinoid plumage colors on the underside.

The Philippine creepers, a single genus of three species of treecreeper-like birds, appear to be highly apomorphic members of the more initial radiation of the Sturnidae.