Is Shiny Starly in Pokemon GO?

Every generation of Pokemon has what I like to call the “starting bird.” It’s that one generic Flying type you always encounter loads of at the start of the game. In gen IV, the starting bird was Starly, though if you caught one and trained it properly, you ended up with Starraptor, one the best Flying type Pokemon there ever was. Man, I miss my Starraptor… Anyway, Starly is a deceptively great Pokemon, but the only thing that could make it better is if it were shiny. So, is shiny Starly in Pokemon GO?

Is Shiny Starly in Pokemon GO?

To be honest, I’m not a hundred percent sure. Starly has somehow become one of those Pokemon whose shiny variants has become something of a myth in itself. The data for Starly’s shiny variant appears to be in Pokemon GO’s files, as there are renders available of its reddish-orange shiny coloration, but there don’t seem to be any official dates of its addition to the game, nor are there any screenshots of someone catching one in the wild. It is possible that the developers did add Starly’s shiny data to the game, but either never got around to making it live or just haven’t found a good occasion to drop it yet. 

Theoretically, if Starly’s shiny variant were available in the game, you’d probably have a very difficult time finding it. At the time of writing, there aren’t any events going on related to Flying types or Pokemon from the Sinnoh region, so all you have to go on is Starly’s normal spawn rate to even have one appear. Add to that, without the aid of events, any given Pokemon only has about a 1 in 450 chance of appearing as shiny in the wild (or about 0.22% if you prefer percentages).

Bottom line, Starly’s shiny variant is apparently the shiny equivalent of vaporware, and your odds of encountering one are basically nil at the moment, so it’s probably not worth thinking about right now.