The strige is a creature of Roman myth, derived from the earlier Greek strix. It was said to be a nocturnal bird, albeit one that hung upside down like a bat, which drank the blood of infants and possibly even ate the remains. The Greek version of the name has since been adopted as a scientific name for a genus of owl, and, blood-drinking aside, the general description does seem to match owls more than anything else that might exist in the real world. The name later also became associated with witches and with a more humanoid form of vampire, the strigoi.
In D&D, of course, the name mutates again to the form "stirge". While it looks even less owl-like than the mythic creature, it's still clearly based on it... but is more inclined to attack adults than babies.
1E
As originally depicted in the 1E Monster Manual, the stirge is a curious creature. It has feathers, which cover most of the body - except, ironically, the wings - but isn't at all bird-like in any other respect. The body is moderately elongated, with skin thrown into loose folds, which presumably become distended after it feeds. The wings are vaguely bat-like, but have a scalloped edge that suggests a different skeletal structure, although the details aren't visible.
It doesn't seem to have a tail. The description says it has feet, but the illustration seems to show that these are more accurately described as large barbed hooks, four of which project from the creature's underside. Their unusual position may even suggest that they aren't limbs in the typical vertebrate sense and they're clearly highly modified if they are; it's notable that the creature evidently has great difficulty moving about on the ground, suggesting that it's incapable of walking and can only slowly haul itself about if forced down. The proboscis is described as long, sharp, dangling, and "snakey", although the picture only supports the first two of those claims.
Stirges are apparently woodland creatures, likely hanging from branches by their claws/hooks while resting. As with many such creatures, subterranean labyrinths are a suitable alternative, although, in this case, that may simply reflect the nocturnal bat-like nature of the creature. They are evidently sociable animals, living in flocks of a dozen or so adults.
2E
The 2E version of the stirge is specifically said to be bird-like, but is even less so than before, lacking any feathers. Instead, it is clearly insect-like, with a distinct thorax and a segmented abdomen that ends in what looks like a pair of cerci. Unlike a true insect, it has only four legs and no antennae, unless they're hidden beneath the hair on its head. The legs clearly are true legs this time, and are mostly insect-like, although possibly with an extra short segment below what entomologists would call the "coxa". It has compound, insectoid, eyes, which are wide enough to give it a decent field of vision.
The wings are actually more bat-like than before, although the index finger is (as often in such pictures) either reduced or absent. The wings clearly have an internal, vertebrate like skeleton, which, since the rest of the animal apparently doesn't, must mean that the humerus is directly anchored to a joint in the thoracic exoskeleton. This would require a fairly complex arrangement, but perhaps no more so than the way insect wings are attached to their bodies. A pair of elongated structures project from just below and to the side of the proboscis; their placement makes no sense for antennae, so they're probably sensory palps similar to those on a mosquito.
There is some further information on such things as their senses and the size of a colony's territory (remarkably small, as it turns out, although they seem to move to new ones regularly). The wingspan is stated to be 60 cm (2 feet), about the same as a sparrowhawk and quite a bit smaller than, say, a barn owl or an Australasian fruit bat.
3E
The stirge is back to being a vertebrate again in this edition. The description has changed from 'bird-like' to 'bat-like', but, aside from the shape of the wings, it's a vague comparison. Mind you, the text also says it's furry and has eight legs, neither of which is true of the creature in the accompanying picture. The pincers clearly are modified tetrapod limbs here, though, being more realistically placed for such things than the equivalent structures in 1E. For the first time, it has four wings and a tail, although the folds of skin are back on the body.
Changes to the system mean that it's harder to hit while in the air than it was before, since it's quite agile. On the other hand, its intelligence is low for this edition, equivalent to a reptile rather than a bat or bird, and it has lost the keen sense of smell mentioned in 2E. It remains sociable, although the colonies are smaller than before, and the habitat has switched from dense forest to tropical wetlands - which would at least still have plenty of trees to roost from.
5E
While 5E illustrations of monsters often hark back more to 1E than those in 3E did, the stirge is very much an exception, undergoing another radical metamorphosis in this edition. It's said to look like a cross between a bat and a mosquito, which would have fit the 2E picture, but isn't at all applicable to what we see here. The creature retains the eight limbs of 3E, but the legs are far less modified, ending in three-toed grasping feet. The remaining four limbs form the leading and trailing edges of a patagium resembling that of a flying squirrel, rather than a bat, and apparently end in three non-functional toes.
The "needle-like" proboscis looks more flexible than that of any earlier edition and ends in what looks like a pair of pincers. Perhaps it uses these to cut into flesh in order to reach the blood vessels, although you'd have thought that a sharp point would have been just as good, if not better (plus, it's a piercing attack, not a cutting one). The eyes are unusually small for something nocturnal, implying that it relies primarily on its darkvision rather than on regular vision - arguably a limitation, given the short range of the former.
In terms of its statistics, it's less agile than in 3E, making it easier to hit, but is easier to kill. Its grip has weakened further - it was all but impossible to remove from a victim in 1E, then difficult, and now almost trivial. The intelligence rating is the same as for most wild animals (including birds) and it doesn't seem dramatically different from a mid-sized bird in most physical respects, either.
Despite, or perhaps because of, being such a minor creature, the physical appearance of the stirge has changed more than almost anything else between editions. Does it primarily resemble a bat, a bird, or a mosquito? Does it have six limbs, eight, or (if we believe the 3E text) twelve? All of this makes it difficult to extrapolate its biology and anatomy based on real-world creatures.It's clearly a vertebrate in most editions, and probably a warm-blooded one. There must be a number of skeletal adaptations just to attach the limbs, some of which seem to be highly modified - although no more so than those of a dolphin. We can probably assume most of the usual bodily organs are present, with lungs and heart in the chest and a liver, kidneys, and so on in the abdomen; these can easily be squished out of the way when the animal is bloated with blood, much as female mammals do when they are pregnant.
There is no indication in the core rulebooks of how stirges breed. Clearly therefore, the sexes don't look that different (which isn't true of mosquitos, for what that's worth) which, among mammals, tends to imply a lack of competition between the males for access to females. So they're either monogamous or, more likely, promiscuous within their colonies.
That this isn't mentioned in the rulebooks isn't surprising, but 2E tends to say at least something about young animals, which it doesn't here. However, the sources do seem clear that stirges rest by hanging upside down, as bats do, which makes regular nests unlikely, and in turn, tends to rule out the possibility that they lay eggs. (They could, of course, construct some sort of roof-like shelter where they live out in the open, as some bats do, but even that would be unnecessary in cave roosts). Live birth is confirmed in one supplementary source for 1E; we'd expect single births to be common, as they are in bats, since the female may need to carry her young about until they can fend for themselves.
Blood is an ideal food supply for many animals, since it's already pre-digested and full of nutrients. Feeding solely or primarily on blood is far more common in invertebrates than vertebrates, with vampire bats and lampreys being the best examples among the latter - in creatures such as vampire finches, it's only an occasional part of the diet.
For something that feeds primarily on blood, and that's already obviously highly modified from the vertebrate norm, a complex digestive system isn't really needed, so we'd expect stirges to have a relatively short and simple intestine together with a greatly extensible stomach and a muscular oesophagus to provide suction. The large stomach enables them to store blood to digest slowly, allowing them to rest for a long time between predatory forays, which fits with some of the published information.
How much blood does a stirge suck from its victim? In most editions, this is described in terms of the number of points damage they inflict, which isn't of any help. That's because hit points are an abstract concept that can't be related to anything in the real world. It's absurd to suggest that a 10th level fighter has over ten times the blood volume of a 1st level wizard, or, for that matter, that they could lose ten times as much blood before keeling over.
Fortunately, 3E provides a different mechanism, giving a stirge's capacity as 4 points of CON damage. In theory, that's still quite a wide range, but PCs, at least, tend not to be at the low end of it, and at least it's possible to deduce a reasonable 'average'. Assuming that that's a CON of 10, it follows that an average human can provide 2.5 stirges with blood before dying. (Of course, we're ignoring the fact that the same is true of a halfling...)
Stirges leave their victim after death, perhaps because they need the heart to be pumping and the blood under pressure to aid their extraction of it. So it's not the total blood volume of the victim that matters here, since the stirge apparently stops feeding before it has completely exsanguinated the body - the corpses they leave behind are not completely bloodless, as one might expect. The relevant figure here is how much blood loss will kill you, and the answer is somewhat variable.
Typically, though, any loss of greater than 2 litres (4.2 pints) of blood from an adult human is considered to constitute "stage IV haemorrhagic shock"... which is a fancy way of saying that survival is unlikely. Death isn't guaranteed though, so the actual loss can be more than this, but that's what high CON is for. Nonetheless, if we take that as our baseline, we can calculate that a stirge is able to extract about 800 ml (1.7 pints) of blood before becoming sated.
And a pint of blood, as we all know, is very nearly an armful.
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