It's a starling, darling...

A photo taken by my wife today rather than me, and using our Canon SLR rather than my HTC camera phone!

We had a visitor today - or rather my wife did. She heard a scratching, scuttling sound from our kitchen floor and found this young starling sitting quietly, despite the presence of our eager (but, on this occasion, remarkably calm) terrier Ella. She managed to catch it (at which point, it finally squawked) and release it out of the kitchen window, from where it took flight into a large rhododendron bush. She wasn't exactly sure what species it was until I came home ("It's a starling, darling" - although I did swither at first over whether it was a young blackbird - I'd only seen the photo, not the bird - but the shape and curve of the beak finally swung it for me).

Further investigations revealed a trail of little white bird poos leading from the fireplace to the kitchen (via a couple on a Geoff Hamilton gardening book), suggesting the poor wee thing had come down the chimney. We have at least three starling nests in our eaves this sumer so it was probably only of the newly fledged birds from one of those.