In Africa, Nesting Superb Starlings Get Help From Family Friends

From the Autumn 2025 issue of Living Bird magazine. Subscribe now.

Chattering birdsong floods the African savannah in Kenya at the heart of the rainy season as a flock of vibrant, lark-sized Superb Starlings—with orange bellies and iridescent teal-blue bodies—flit between the branches of an acacia tree. One starling sits with her nestlings in a beehive-shaped nest, while another swoops in with a caterpillar in its beak for the babies. But this starling helping to feed the nestlings isn’t the father, nor even a brother or sister or other blood relative. It’s an entirely unrelated bird, helping at the nest of a flockmate that had helped them out the previous breeding season at their own nest.

A field study published in May in the journal Nature used two decades of data to reveal that Superb Starlings will form these lifelong relationships and reciprocally help unrelated birds with raising chicks. That is, bird A will help bird B raise its nestlings one year, and bird B will help bird A raise its nestlings the next—with the pair alternating these roles over several years.

This research marks the first time such reciprocity outside the bounds of genetic relationships has been documented in birds.

“These relationships [between the starlings] are really complex,” says Alexis Earl, a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University and lead author of the study. “It’s an investment, over time, in the same specific, preferred individuals.”

Cooperative breeding has been previously documented in many bird species. Several studies have examined how young Florida Scrub-Jays help their parents defend a natal territory and raise the next breeding season’s young— kind of like the eldest child helping with a new baby in a human family.

Other studies have documented unrelated birds helping out at the nests of flockmates of the same species. Mike Webster, the director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library, has conducted field studies on breeding Variegated Fairywrens in Australia and observed that some fairywrens will feed the nestlings of unrelated birds.

But the fairywrens don’t alternate between the roles of laying eggs and nest helpers like the Superb Starlings do. Webster says this level of behavioral complexity in a social group of birds is still an emerging concept in ornithological study—making the African starlings even more, well, superb.

“We’re starting to discover more and more [bird] groups where you have more complex social structures, like multiple breeding females in the group [with fairywrens], or reciprocity, trading off who’s breeding and who’s helping, like in the starlings,” says Webster, who was not affiliated with this study. “It may be that it’s more common than we realize.”

Such multiyear, reciprocal nest helping relationships are difficult to document because they require a lot of data. For the study on Superb Starlings, two decades of nest observations were needed from a still ongoing field study in Kenya by Dustin Rubenstein’s lab at Columbia University, where Rubenstein is a professor of ecology, evolution, and environmental biology.

The study site is in a harsh savannah environment that alternates between dry and rainy seasons of varying severity over the years. During dry seasons, the starlings won’t breed due to a lack of food, so the research team trapped the birds and put colored bands on their legs so they can be easily identified later. During rainy seasons, when the birds breed, the researchers watched and recorded who’s helping at whose nest. Over time, the patterns of specific birds alternating roles at the nest begin to emerge.

Over the course of 20 years of data collection, Wilson Watetu—a study coauthor, field manager, and Kenyan native who works for the Mpala Research Centre and Conservancy—has been struck by the intelligence of the Superb Starlings. He says the starlings now recognize him and will alarm-call in a specific way whenever they see him.

That intelligence also makes Superb Starlings very popular with local people, Watetu says, as the starlings make alarm calls whenever they see predators like snakes, warning humans and other birds alike.

He says the starlings are also beloved for their brilliant coloration.

“[Local tribes] love them so much that they call them the same names as humans,” Watetu says. “The Kikuyu from this area, they call them wanjirû mûirû. Wanjirû is a girl’s name, and mûirû is black, so it means beautiful, black girl.

“The Boorana and Gabra, they call them shukulisa, which is also the name of a girl. [The starlings] are birds that are adored by people.”

Rubenstein says that his lab at Columbia will continue studying the social interactions of Superb Starlings away from the nest, to see if the bonds they form over cofeeding nestlings are maintained when the birds aren’t breeding.

These bonds among unrelated birds appear to be rock solid, according to the study. The researchers found that even when they have opportunities to help family members with their nestlings, a starling may still choose to help an unrelated bird that they know—as if they were a close friend.

“These relationships with non-kin are sort of similar to the relationships that they have with family,” says Earl. “The saying goes, ‘friends are the family you choose,’ right?”

Angelina Tang’s work on this article as a student editorial assistant was made possible by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Science Communications Fund, with support from Jay Branegan (Cornell ’72) and Stefania Pittaluga.