Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Of birds, bards & a scourge of starlings
If you find your bird feeders being ravaged by a scourge of starlings this winter (like ours have been) and you’re looking for someone to blame, look no further than that most famous of all playwrights, William Shakespeare. Okay, it may not directly be Shakespeare’s fault that we’re now subject to the evil reign of these aggressive, dirty, invasive birds from England, but culpability does fall heavily into the lap of one of the bard’s most devoted enthusiasts, Mr. Eugene Schieffelin of New York City.
As one of Shakespeare’s foremost fans, Schieffelin, a German immigrant, admired how often the playwright referenced birds in his writing. From blackbirds to buzzards, cormorants to cuckoos, and falcons to finches, Shakespeare’s writings are rife with avian imagery with over 60 different species of birds being cited. So in tribute to his favorite writer, Schieffelin began his quest to bring every bird mentioned by the bard (at least the ones that weren’t already native here) to North America.
In all of his writings, Shakespeare mentions starlings only once, but that’s plenty good enough for Schieffelin. This occurs in Act 1, Scene 3, of the play Henry IV as Hotspur imagines ways in which he might torment the king. This is where the reference to a starling, a bird that Hotspur apparently believes can be trained to talk like a myna bird, comes in. “Nay, I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but Mortimer, and give it to him to keep his anger still in motion,” Hotspur declares. Mortimer happens to be the name of one of the king’s most dreaded enemies.
So thanks to Hotspur, Schieffelin, an amateur ornithologist and a member of the New York Zoological Society, imported 60 starlings to New York. Then, on March 6, 1890, he and his cohorts released the birds in Central Park. Turns out that was a big mistake. The New World apparently agreed with these alien invaders so much that, from those original 60 birds, we’re now, some 131 years later, plagued with more than 200 million of the European starling (Sturnus vulgaris) here in North America.
Unfortunately, starlings are among the most successful invasive species to ever hit our shores, and worse, they ferociously compete with our native North American bird species. This competitive drama plays out every day right outside my window as raucous gangs of starlings overwhelm the wrens, nuthatches, cardinals, woodpeckers, juncos, and others in a battle for feeder supremacy. Fighting vehemently for their next beakful of sunflower seed or suet, starlings can empty a feeder in record time, leaving our intended feathered guests with no more than table scraps.
But feeder wars aren’t the only front where these birds suppress our native species. Starlings are aggressive and omnivorous with a diet that includes anything edible, so they challenge native seed eaters and insect eaters alike. They’re also adaptable when it comes to habitat, and since they happen to be cavity nesters, they often displace or usurp native cavity nesters like bluebirds, screech owls, wood ducks, woodpeckers, swallows and others. And because starlings are, quite literally, dirty birds, once they raise their families and abandon the nesting site, they’ll leave the cavity so filthy that our more fastidious native birds subsequently refuse to nest there.
Our starling population here still seems to be going strong although at least one study suggests the starling population is actually declining in North America with a 52 percent decrease between 1966 and 2015. And for some unknown reason their numbers have been falling off in the United Kingdom where starling numbers have dropped by some 66 per cent since the mid-1970s. But here in Chester County, especially this year, these pests seem particularly prominent. That could be because in the winter these birds roost together in large numbers (known as murmurations of starlings) that voraciously descend on our feeders during feeding forays. These birds are also hardy and long-lived with an average lifespan of 15 years.
But as bad as this infestation of starlings has been, I suspect things could have been quite a bit more dicey if Mr. Schieffelin had completely followed through with his plan. After all, as Cade tells Iden in Act 4, Scene 10, of Henry VI Part 2, “Ah, villain, thou wilt betray me, and get a thousand crowns of the king carrying my head to him: but I’ll make thee eat iron like an ostrich, and swallow my sword like a great pin, ere thou and I part.”
Starlings are bad enough. I suspect ostriches might be much worse.