Such prowess, of course, makes starlings a bittersweet inheritance, the bird that even Audubon’s website recently informed readers that it’s O.K. to hate. Starlings have been known to drive other native bird species from nests and backyard feeders; they pilfer grains from farmers’ fields and storage sheds and corrode surfaces with their droppings. On the plus side, they are one of the world’s most proficient exterminators, yearly consuming millions of pestilent insects, grubs and worms. Their dazzling murmurations — exquisitely synchronized midair swirls of their gigantic flocks — can black out skies. The males have been known to decorate their nests with flowers to attract mates and fumigate their dwellings with fresh herbs to repel unwanted pests.

Still, perched up here as I’ve been in my sixth-floor aerie over the years, I find that the starling’s great intelligence and vocal skills have most beguiled me, as they have so many over the ages. Pliny the Elder once claimed that starlings can be taught to speak lines of Latin and Greek. In late May 1784, in a Viennese shop, Mozart heard a starling singing a motif strikingly similar to the allegro movement of his Piano Concerto No. 17 in G Major. He ended up buying the bird and grew so attached that when it died three years later, he held an elaborate funeral procession and composed a poem for the beloved bird, burying it in his yard. As one translation reads: “A little fool lies here/Whom I hold dear/A starling in the prime/of his brief time.”

It’s not merely the starling’s powers of mimicry but the apparent inventiveness that so enthralls. Most birds have a signature call that they repeat over and over again. Starlings also make things up as they go along, trying out different riffs, injecting new clauses midsentence, suggesting that a property of human language known as recursion may — like so many other widely shared phenomena: tool use, culture, self-­recognition, empathy, grieving — not be exclusive to us. Indeed, it came as no surprise to me to read back in 2006 that a scientific study was done of starlings, analyzing their vocal capabilities to better understand the origins of human language.

Lucky for me, I have long had a working lab right here outside my living-­room window. Nothing lifts my spirits more than to see starlings alight there throughout the day, roll their heads to let the breeze comb their neck feathers and then let loose over Brooklyn’s tumbledown rooftops with madcap soliloquies, outpourings of which the Bard would have been proud. Lovely how such slight and flitting beings can knock us humans off our pedestal of self-­importance and exceptionalism. How each time they alight, they seem to make a whole city recede, rendering it a mere perch for their passing purposes — and these words little more than a poor translation.