European starling in non-breeding plumage
“Nay, I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but Mortimer, and give it him to keep his anger still in motion.” So imagines Hotspur in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I, Act I as he fantasizes a plot to torment the king with repetition of his enemy’s name and the only reference to starlings in all of Shakespeare’s work. But, it seems to have been enough for Eugene Schieffelin, an early pharmaceutical entrepreneur in New York City. Schieffelin was president of the American Acclimatization Society, a group dedicated to introducing European flora and fauna into the United States. He also had a personal passion for Shakespeare and, allegedly, a goal of bringing to America every bird mentioned in the bard’s work. So, in the early 1890’s, Schieffelin imported about 100 European starlings over two seasons and released them in Central Park - the sole ancestors of the 220 million starlings found throughout North America today.
Starlings cause $800 million a year in crop damage. In 1960, an Eastern Airlines flight out of Boston’s Logan Airport flew into a flock of 20,000 starlings and crashed killing 62 of the 72 people on board - still the worst bird strike induced airplane crash in aviation history. Should we designate the European starling a “bad bird?” (See my April 23, 2020 post “Bad Birds?”) Even the Audubon Society has debated the possibility of “hating starlings.”
Many of Schieffelin’s attempts with other birds failed, except, notably, the ubiquitous house sparrow. In 1852, Schieffelin released 16 European sparrows in his Brooklyn neighborhood spawning the 540 million house sparrows that we have today including the 5 million living under the solar panels on my roof. (Hamlet, Act V, Scene 2: “There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come - the readiness is all” - shades of Baba Ram Dass teaching us to Be Here Now.)
Speaking of “murmuring Mortimer,” starlings are known to congregate in enormous flocks called murmurations. These dramatic and almost creepy avian formations inspire memories of Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller, The Birds, in which multiple bird species attack humans in the sleepy northern California coastal town of Bodega Bay. You’ve got to have a look at this mesmerizing, short film of a real life murmuration.