Starling songs in the news: Origins of language?

I've had a bit of a thing for starlings since I found an audio clip online of a starling repeating its owners' entire phone ringing/answering machine message/beep sequence. I read that they are illegal to sell as pets because they were introduced illegally to the country, but if you take one from a nest it's yours. There are so many starlings in DC that I don't really see why this rule needs to be in place anymore, but whatever. I looked for that audio clip again but I only found something similar: starling speak. (Note: I think this site may be pretty busy because of the NYT article, and people doing what I'm doing: Googling.) I sent this to Ben because I think it's funny. I was surprised to see today this article in New York Times about starlings giving us more information about the origins of language. It seems that the starlings could understand better grammar than monkeys. Of course, scientists are having little egotistical brain wars over whether this is actually important to the evolution of human language. I just think starlings are neat.