Shakespeare’s Songbirds Darken American Skies

Of the six hundred birds that appear in Shakespeare, the starling appears only once, in Act I of Henry IV. Shakespeare named more than 600 birds in his complete works, among them the eagle (forty mentions) and the wren (nine mentions). However, despite its diminutive presence in the lines of the bard, the common starling has caused an outsize problem in the lands Europeans had just begun to explore in Shakespeare’s day.

In the 1890s, Eugene Schieffelin, an eccentric druggist and literary enthusiast, notoriously released one hundred starlings in Central Park, determined that it should hold every bird that appeared in the pages of Shakespeare. Joe DiCostanzo, bird specialist for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, has observed that purposeful introductions of foreign species occurred frequently in the 1800s, often initiated by societies of zoological enthusiasts.

Schieffelin chaired the American Acclimatization Society, which had already released starlings under his direction in the 1870s, along with some Japanese finches. The finches did not thrive, but the starlings eventually took off beyond the park. Today, the starling population numbers among the most common birds in the United States. The dark, round birds, described as noisy in the United States or gregarious if you’re from England, also number among North America’s most notorious pests, becoming aggressive around native species.

Starlings can also pose a serious threat to people. The landing of the jetliner in the Hudson in January after an avian collision came as a surprise to many. The guilty parties in the Hudson crash were geese, but starlings are also a notable culprit in airline collisions, referred to as “feathered bullets” for their high-density build and ubiquity in the Northeastern skies.

The U.S. government trapped or poisoned 1.7 million of the birds last year, to no avail. As environmental writer Kim Todd notes, in Henry the IV the starling was presented not as a gift but as a curse.

The definitive text on birds and the bard is Birds of Shakespeare written by Sir Archibald Geikie in 1916. In our digital age, you can read the complete work online.

Photo: flickr/ r.i.c.h.