Rosy Starling

I'm currently on a push to document (do a post on) each bird I've seen. As I'm getting close to finishing that effort, I'm doing birds that I've got poor photos of, or no photos of, or that haven't excited me as much as others. Toward that end, I've had kind of a love/hate relationship with starlings. I've always hated the European starling which we have locally and which I've always viewed as an invasive garbage bird. Yet you get to Africa and Asia and the starlings are among the most beautiful of birds and the myna, although not beautiful, is an amazing talking bird, and it is a a starling. I just saw a video recently of a European starling, someone's pet, that was trilling and making amazingly beautiful sounds and I had a begrudging kind of aha moment where I thought, maybe they aren't so bad and ugly (although still horribly invasive). 

The rosy starling is another lifer that I did not get a photo of. It was seen last November in Keoladeo NP in India. 

Illustration from Birds of the World.

Range from Birds of the World.