Shakespeare and the Starling

NYT:https://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/01/opinion/100-years-of-the-starling.html

100 years of the Starling

The year was 1890 when an eccentric drug manufacturer named Eugene Schieffelin entered New York City’s Central Park and released some 60 European starlings he had imported from England. In 1891 he loosed 40 more. Schieffelin’s motives were as romantic as they were ill fated: he hoped to introduce into North America every bird mentioned by Shakespeare.

Skylarks and song thrushes failed to thrive, but the enormity of his success with starlings continues to haunt us. This centennial year is worth observing as an object lesson in how even noble intentions can lead to disaster when humanity meddles with nature.

Today the starling is ubiquitous, with its purple and green iridescent plumage and its rasping, insistent call. It has distinguished itself as one of the costliest and most noxious birds on our continent.

Roosting in hordes of up to a million, starlings can devour vast stores of seed and fruit, offsetting whatever benefit they confer by eating insects. In a single day, a cloud of omnivorous starlings can gobble up 20 tons of potatoes.

What they don’t eat they defile with droppings. They are linked to numerous diseases, including histoplasmosis, a fungal lung ailment that afflicts agricultural workers; toxoplasmosis, especially dangerous to pregnant women, and Newcastle disease, which kills poultry. Starlings bully several native species, often rudely evicting bluebirds and woodpeckers.
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In 1960 a Lockheed Electra plummeted seconds after taking off from Logan Airport in Boston, killing 62 people. Some 10,000 starlings had flown straight into the plane, crippling its engines. Any bird in the wrong place can pose such a danger, but it is the ever-present starling that pilots fret over the most.

As usual in the history of man’s importation of species across oceans and continents, Schieffelin was not thinking of long-term consequences. For the first six years after he released his birds they rarely strayed beyond Manhattan. The first nesting pair, discovered in the eaves of the Museum of Natural History, across the street from Central Park, inspired jubilation.

Once the starlings began to spread, though, their numbers and range soon exploded. They were able to adapt to climates as varied as Alaska’s and Florida’s; they were willing and able to eat anything; and they reproduced with startling vigor. ”Starlings,” one ornithologist wrote, ”do nothing in moderation.”

By 1928 they were found as far west as the Mississippi. By 1942 they were in California. By the mid-1950’s they numbered more than 50 million. Schieffelin’s mission had become more appropriate to a work of Hitchcock than of Shakespeare.

Starlings have proved themselves to be virtually ineradicable, though millions of dollars have been spent trying. Few creatures have inspired so much folly. In 1948 the superintendent of sanitation in Washington, D.C., having failed to rout the birds with balloons and artificial owls, tried exposing them to itching powder. The police used mechanical hawks. An Interior Department consultant proposed placing grease around starling feeding sites, hoping they would track the gook back to their nests and cover their own eggs, preventing them from hatching.

Later, electricians laid live wires across the Corinthian columns of the Capitol and other prominent buildings to discourage starlings from roosting. They simply took up residence in whatever nearby structures were not hot-wired. When the White House grounds were plagued, speakers were set up to broadcast recordings of starlings rasping out their alarm call. (The birds vacated to sycamore trees on Pennsylvania Avenue, whose branches were then smeared with chemicals to irritate their feet.) Later, the war against starlings turned nasty. In the early 1960’s a Federal Government experiment with poisoned pellets killed thousands of starlings in Nevada. From 1964 to 1967 nine million starlings were poisoned in California’s Solano County in an effort to protect feed lots. During that same period the California Department of Agriculture experimented with irradiating captive starlings with lethal doses of cobalt-60. In Providence, R.I., officials set off Roman candles near flocks.

The most innovative solution, though, was advanced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1931. ”When the breasts of these birds have been soaked in a soda-salt solution for 12 hours and then parboiled in water, which is afterwards discarded, they may be used in a meat pie that compares fairly well with one made of blackbirds or English sparrows.” But, cautioned the author, the gamy taste was not for everyone.