December 8, 2023
Motley flocks of small black birds have been hanging out in our trees at dusk and dawn. I haven’t figured out if they are migrating flocks or if it’s the same ragtag mob I keep seeing - I’m not very good with faces and they all pretty much look the same to me. In late autumn, Red-winged Blackbirds, Grackles and Starlings will often band together in very large mixed flocks, either for safety, migration purposes, gregarious partying or just the pure joy of making humans nervous.
Starlings were first successfully introduced to this continent in 1890 by Eugene Schieffelin, the chairman of the American Acclimatization Society in New York City. The primary mission of the Society was to import nonnative flora and fauna into the country. There were acclimatization societies in France and England and in Australia and New Zealand as well. The acclimatization fever had profound and decidedly negative impacts on native ecosystems, especially in the otherwise isolated islands. The idea of acclimatization was to remodel and improve upon nature by spreading everything everywhere. What could possibly go wrong with that?
There is an often-repeated story that Schieffelin wanted to import every bird that Shakespeare mentioned in his works, but other than the fact that both a Shakespeare renaissance and the release of the starlings happened in Central Park concurrently, there is no evidence that paying homage to Shakespeare was Schieffelin’s main objective. What is well documented, though, is that he released 60 starlings in Central Park in the sleeting rain. He wasn’t sure they’d survive but the little speckled birds took cover under the eaves of the Natural History Museum and hung out there until warmer weather arrived - at which point they started to proliferate and flourish. There are now more than 200 million starlings across North America. They are considered a highly invasive nuisance, known for bullying Bluebirds and Woodpeckers out of their nesting cavities. Through the lens of hindsight, Schieffelin himself is considered “an eccentric at best- a lunatic at worst.”
As reviled as starlings have become, they are equally admired for their synchronized flying acrobatics called murmurations. Researchers have been trying to figure out how starlings coordinate their movements en masse. To me, though, it’s like watching the crowd do “the wave” in a sports arena. As long as each person reacts to whatever the person next to them is doing, the entire stadium looks like one cohesive unit. Perhaps murmurations are just the starling’s version of the stadium wave, taunting us humans because they know that at 200 million strong, they are definitely winning the acclimatization game. Remodeling and improving upon nature indeed!