Chestnut-cheeked Starling

The chestnut-cheeked starling is a small East Asian starling whose common name points to the warm cheek patch. It breeds in Japan, Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands and an island near Vladivostok, then winters in Taiwan, the Philippines and northern Borneo. Birds seen farther south are migrants rather than Sulawesi residents. Molecular phylogenetic studies published in 2008 led to its transfer from Sturnus to the revived genus Agropsar (Wikipedia account; Hong Kong Bird Watching Society).

Pairs breed from May to July and forage mainly in trees for insects, spiders and berries; in Japan the bird is associated with the cherry season and eats cherry fruit. Both sexes clean old material from a woodpecker hole, then line the cavity with dry leaves, grasses and sometimes feathers. A typical sequence is one egg daily to a five-egg clutch, about 15 days of incubation and fledging roughly two weeks after hatching. These breeding observations come from Japan, not Sulawesi (BirdLife International 2025).