Réunion Starling

The hoopoe starling was 30 cm (12 in) in length. The bird's culmen was 41 mm (1+5⁄8 in) long, its wing 147 mm (5+13⁄16 in), its tail 114 mm (4+1⁄2 in), and its tarsus about 39 mm (1+9⁄16 in) long. It was the largest of the three Mascarene starlings. A presumed adult male (NHMUK 1889.5.30.15) in the Paris museum has a light ash-grey head and back of the neck (lighter on the hind-neck), with a long crest the same colour with white shafts. Its back and tail are ash-brown, its wings darker with a greyish wash, and its upper tail covert feathers and rump have a rufous wash. Its primary coverts are white with brown tips; the bases (instead of the tips) are brown in other specimens. The superciliary stripe, lore, and most of the specimen's underside is white, with a pale rufous wash on the flanks and undertail coverts. The extent of light rufous on the underside varies by specimen. The beak and legs are lemon-yellow, with yellow-brown claws. It has a bare, triangular area of skin around the eye, which may have been yellow in life. Though the species' iris was described as bluish-brown, it has been depicted as brown, yellow, or orange.

There has been confusion about which characteristics were sexually dimorphic in the species. Only three specimens were sexed (all males), with age and individual variation not considered. …

Little is known about the behaviour of the hoopoe starling. According to François Levaillant's 1807 account of the bird (which included observations from a Réunion resident) it was abundant, with large flocks inhabiting humid areas and marshes. In 1831, Lesson, without explanation, described its habits as similar to those of a crow. Its song was described as a "bright and cheerful whistle" and "clear notes", indicating a similarity to the songs of other starlings. Vinson's 1877 account relates his experiences with the bird more than 50 years earlier:

Now these daughters of the wood, when they were numerous, flew in flocks and went thus in the rain forests, while deviating little from one another, as good companions or as nymphs taking a bath: they lived on berries, seeds and insects, and the créoles, disgusted by the latter fact, held them for an impure game. Sometimes, coming from the woods to the littoral [coast], always flying and leaping from tree to tree, branch to branch, they often alighted in swarms on coffee trees in bloom, and there was in the past the testimony of an inhabitant of the Island of Bourbon, said the naturalist Levaillant, that they caused big damage in coffee trees by making the flowers fall prematurely. …