Oh Starling, My Darling

Feb 17, 2023

I thought they were grackles at first. Darkly grouped dots rushed from the anemic lawn, to telephone wire, the naked tree, and back again. As I watched, one cloudy mass flew close enough to offer a glimpse of the star-speckled plumage that could only mean one bird: Sturnus vulgaris, the starling.

By definition, vulgaris means “common” in Latin, something ordinary, derived from the masses. Its usage aims to describe something simple or plain, but its use as an adjective to describe the starling seems only applicable in terms of the birds' ability to multiply, its hardy adaptability allowing the European natives to spread and occupy almost every continent. From awe-inspiring murmurations to inspiring Mozart, this “ordinary” species has proved extraordinary, yet society’s dogged perception stands as a revealing testament to understanding our relationships with the natural world.

Since the 1900’s, starlings have been widely reviled as a destructive invasive species, bullying other birds around feeders and nesting holes, causing billions of dollars in damage to agricultural crops, and spreading disease. They are not protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and a vast majority of these animals are killed with a poison explicitly invented for them called DRC-1339, or Starlicide, which causes a “slow, "nonviolent" death by uremic poisoning and congestion of major organs.”

On the other hand, they have become one of the most successful and widespread bird species in North America, beloved by many for their beautiful singing and their acrobatic flight displays. Starlings have diverse and complex vocalizations and have been known to mimic and incorporate sounds from their surroundings into their own calls, including car alarms and human speech patterns. The birds can recognize particular individuals by their calls and are the subject of research into the evolution of human language. For three years, Mozart kept a pet starling. He called the bird Vogelstar, the German name for the species and when it died, he held a notable funeral for his feathered friend. It’s widely regarded that many elements of Mozart’s A Musical Joke "bear the vocal autograph of a starling."

The birds themselves are something to see, polka-dot feathers layered over a purple-green sheen. A film of stars floating atop an oil slick. And if you’ve ever had the opportunity to watch them fly together, it’s a sight you won’t forget. Taking to the sky in flocks called murmurations, starlings billow and swirl like magnetic dust, a mass of iron powder sprinkled across the heavens, controlled by a magnet of their own making. “To behold starlings is to take in something beautiful, a coordinated effort to do something in which there’s no leader, no hero.” — Barry Lopez

And it all began with a Shakespearean bird-stan…

…*kind of.

The starling’s origin story goes something like this:

On the morning of March 6, 1890, New York pharmaceutical manufacturer & amateur ornithologist Eugene Schieffelin released sixty starlings he had imported from Europe over Central Park. Presumably, it was Schieffelin’s love of both Shakespeare and birds, as well as his affiliation with the American Acclimatization Society, that would drive him to import and release starlings and other avian species mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays and poems into America. The other birds, nightingales, skylarks, and the like, hadn’t survived. Schieffelin had know way of knowing what he was unleashing, but the starlings would ultimately fare much better.

*And it’s not even true! You see, various acclimatization society records mention instances of starlings being introduced in Cincinnati, Quebec and New York in the 1870s, long before Schieffelin’s 60 set flight over Central Park. The myth of this story was uncovered by Dr. John MacNeill Miller and then-student researcher Lauren Fugate in 2021. The researchers credit the Pulitzer Prize-winning nature writer Edwin Way Teale for exaggerating the story of Schieffelin’s “curious hobby” of introducing “all the birds mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare.”

Dr. Miller reminds us that this tale of the starling, “should keep us curious and open-minded about the value of creatures we’ve been taught to write off as uninteresting or even insidious. Starlings probably aren’t the only pest species that deserve a second look.”

And that my friends is how a single perception can shape the lens through which we view nature. The story alters our vision of these birds, setting the stage for their inherent insidiousness. The relationships we have to the world around us — including plants and animals — are only navigable through the agency of our collective stories. Stories equally shape our perceptions for good and for bad. To quote Barry Lopez once more, “Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”

I watched the starlings for a while and felt a kinship to this misunderstood passerine, this pariah of the bird world. As a kid, I was the pesky younger sibling, always underfoot and constantly attempting to mimic those my senior. A pest, an irritation, an annoyance to be swatted and shooed away, (fun fact: one of my childhood nicknames was “la cucarachita”, which translates to the little cockroach in Spanish). While aground, I watched those around me; observing, learning, until I’d collected enough cues for flight.

Click here to watch a video of the starlings outside my window.

Here rests a bird called Starling,
A foolish little Darling.
He was still in his prime
When he ran out of time,
And my sweet little friend
Came to a bitter end,
Creating a terrible smart
Deep in my heart.
Gentle Reader! Shed a tear,
For he was dear,
Sometimes a bit too jolly
And, at times, quite folly,
But nevermore
A bore.
I bet he is now up on high
Praising my friendship to the sky,
Which I render
Without tender;
For when he took his sudden leave,
Which brought to me such grief,
He was not thinking of the man
Who writes and rhymes as no one can.

— Mozart's poem on the death of his beloved pet bird

Books I'm reading:

Winter World by Bernd Heinrich,
Mozart’s Starling by Lyanda Lynn Haupt, memoir
Hildegard of Bingen by Fiona Maddocks, biography

(a very German booklist, ja?)

Place we've been exploring: Kirvin Park in Pittsfield

Something that's giving me pause: Garbage Time

February's Playlist >> Oh Starling, My Darling

*a note about this playlist: Lately I’ve been doing some shadow work that’s taken me to a place I call “the lost years.” Music often makes its way into our worlds like forgotten change, reappearing every so often — a dropped penny in a supermarket as Dave Matthews Band plays over muffled speakers. A passenger seat quarter you graze while Sonic Youth grinds on a friend’s car stereo. Our brains acknowledge its existence, might even take us back to the place where we misplaced it in the first place, but the song ends and the coin vanishes from view. Be warned: Musical time-travel can be a dangerous game. Those first notes draw you in, glimmering with familiarity, and then you find yourself wide-open and gasping, impaled on a sweet, shiny hook of nostalgia. As I retrace my steps during this time of self-excavation, I’ve got both a spade and metal detector in hand. With every beep, I dig just below the surface, scrounging for coppers that link my former heart to my present head, an auditory attempt to make sense of it all. Music can take you there and back again but only you can decide what to do with the change once the song ends.

Current Obsessions:

Daily cold exposure, 1st thing upon waking.
Trader Joe’s Triple Gingersnaps
LMNT Salt Packets
Joy Brooker’s singing telegrams

Stay in motion,
Tay

TayLore

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