A Day of Starling Revelations
By John Pancake
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 16, 2000

HOTSPUR: [The king] Forbade my tongue to speak of Mortimer.
But I will find him when he is asleep,
And in his ear I'll holler "Mortimer!"
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.
--William Shakespeare; "Henry IV, Part 1," Act 1, Scene
3

Today we celebrate Starling Day.
This is the 110th anniversary of the chilly afternoon when a wealthy New
Yorker named Eugene Schieffelin, oddly moved
by the passage above, left his Madison Avenue digs, marched into Central
Park and released 60 black birds whose
feathers glowed with a greenish-purple sheen.
It must be said that in previous years, celebrations of Starling Day have
been subdued. In fact, they have been confined
almost entirely to my living room. But permit me to suggest that there is
something worth very modest, very temperate
(we've got St. Paddy's Day tomorrow) rejoicing. It is a time to reflect on
the slightly off-center folk--from Christopher
Columbus to Schieffelin to Monica S. Lewinsky--who yanked on the steering
wheel of history and sent things swerving off
into the weeds.
Perhaps, too, March 16 should be a time of quiet admiration for America's
least loved bird. In truth, the starling is despised
because it succeeded, because it expanded into every nook and cranny of
North America. (Let's see, now, it's human
beings who are faulting the starling for this? Have I got that right?)
The birds of Shakespeare were Schieffelin's passion. The country needed
them. He was sure of it. He imported
bullfinches, chaffinches, nightingales and skylarks. They're gone. But more
than 200,000,000 starlings pepper the skies of
North America.
The starling's knack for exploiting, adapting to and, in some cases,
outwitting Homo sapiens is one key to the bird's
ubiquity. The starling's range now stretches from the Arctic to New
Zealand, and includes 30 percent of the Earth's land
surface.
Christopher Feare, the British ornithologist who wrote the book on the
starling ("The Starling," 1984), likens Sturnus
vulgaris to that astonishingly resourceful creature the used-car salesman.
It's tough, opportunistic, capable of taking advantage of almost any
situation. It wears a shiny, black coat and looks to
human eyes as if it walks with a New Jersey swagger. While it's true that
Mozart wrote music based on the starling's
whistle, if starlings went to Tower Records they would more likely be over
by the Springsteen bin.
The starlings--officially they're called "European starlings"--began to
breed almost immediately after being released in
Central Park. The first recorded nest was under the eaves of the American
Museum of Natural History, a bastion of
American ornithology. Of course, it would be entirely wrong to suppose this
was some sort of in-your-face gesture. Really,
it would.
The starling population soon engulfed the continent like an amoeba. It is
not unusual for a species to spread unchecked
on an island or in an isolated region. A takeover on a continental scale is
uncommon. But turn-of-the-century America was
ripe for the starling. The bird is adapted for prairies and open fields. If
it had shown up when North America was still
heavily forested, who knows whether it would have flourished? But man had
cleared much of North America by 1890, so it
was prime starling habitat.
Even the cities. A starling can make a meal out of a tremendous variety of
foods, ranging from cultivated cherries to
caterpillars, bugs and grasshoppers to the occasional discarded Whopper.
Although starlings feed primarily on the
ground, they can shift gears. Sometimes they even hawk flying insects on
the wing like a phoebe or purple martin.
Some biologists believe that one secret of the starling's success is a
counterintuitive adaptation in the musculature of its
beak. Most songbirds' beaks are set up to close down on food. But the
muscles attached to the starling's bill also allow
the bird to open with considerable force. This means the starling can pry
apart matted grass, loose soil or leaf litter to
uncover grubs, insect eggs and other morsels unavailable to many other
birds. It gives the starling an edge.
There's another wrinkle associated with this open-beak prying. The
starling's skull is particularly pinched and narrow in
the front so that when the beak is open, the starling's eyes, which are
normally on the side of the head, shift forward and
the bird has a good view of what it has pried apart.
Starlings will nest in almost any kind of cavity--hollow trees, cornices,
bell towers, traffic lights, Kmart signs, fence posts,
old motors, haystacks, kingfisher burrows, swallow holes, bluebird boxes.
They are particularly fond of woodpecker holes. Ornithologist Arthur
Cleveland Bent said they sometimes watch a flicker
excavating a hole and then, when it is the proper size and depth, drive the
larger bird away and take over.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist John Trapp has seen them nest in
the dryer vents from laundry rooms in the
apartment building across from his office in Arlington. Not long ago, a
workman spent all day covering the vents. It took
the starlings only a week to get around the new baffles.
Despite his profound influence on the bird life of North America, much
about Eugene Schieffelin (pronounced CHEF-lun)
has been lost. He was born in 1827 into a prosperous New York family.
Words like "black sheep" come up when you talk to members of the
Schieffelin family about Eugene today. Mary
Schieffelin, 86 and crisp as a starched shirt: "Oh, yes. The starlings. Oh,
yes, he was infamous."
But the family is a little foggy on where he is buried and whether a
picture of him still exists. Though he was connected to
the family pharmaceutical business, a spokesman for Schieffelin & Somerset
Co., now a wine and spirits importer, says
Eugene apparently did not play a major role there. His obituaries (he was
written up in the Times, the Evening Post and
the Tribune) mention that he was something of an artist. Portraits,
apparently. He was well connected, a member of the
Union Club, the city's oldest men's club.
He occasionally dropped by the bird department of the American Museum of
Natural History (where he came to be
regarded as a nice, but misguided man) to chat about birds. He was a
trustee of the New York Zoological Society and
proudly presented the Bronx Zoo with a "starling roost" in 1903. It's not
clear what the starling roost was or what the zoo did
with it.
According to the New York Genealogical Society, to which he belonged,
Eugene was married to a Catherine Hall, but the
society has no record of any offspring. He died, after a stroke, in
Newport, R.I., on Aug. 14, 1906, at age 80.
He began his Shakespearean quest in 1860, when he brought English sparrows
to New York City. Shakespeare may not
have been the only thing behind it; according to one report, he thought
they might help control caterpillars.
Though his motives may have been mixed when it came to sparrows, historians
and the Schieffelin family agree that
Shakespeare was the catalyst for his big success in 1890 when he brought
over a load of starlings from England.
There is some disagreement about the exact date of the first release, but
Joe Di Costanzo, president of the New York
Linnean Society and an ornithologist at the American Museum of Natural
History, says his records indicate that March 16
was the day.
Ultimately, of course, it was the starling's remarkable vocal abilities
that secured it a place in "Henry IV" and its ticket
across the Atlantic.
Starlings produce a wide variety of whistles, cackles, rattles, clicks,
squeals, chuckles and cries. Some are characteristic
of the species--the most familiar sounds a bit like the name the Dutch give
the bird, spreeuw. But singing males also
improvise, incorporating sounds of nearby birds, mammals and even machinery
into their songs.
They have been kept as pets for 2,500 years, and their ability to imitate
human speech was recorded in ancient times. And
that is exactly what the fictional character Hotspur is talking about in
his tirade in "Henry IV." Hotspur badgers the king to
ransom Mortimer, Hotspur's brother-in-law. When the king tells Hotspur
never to mention Mortimer again, the volatile
soldier hits on the notion of having a trained bird nag the king for him.
He never follows through on the plan and is eventually killed by Prince
Hal, but the bird he unleashed on America lives on.

Starling Stats:
Sturnus vulgaris, a member of the mynah family, was introduced to America
late in the 19th century. Since then, it has
overwhelmed most of the continent.

Inspirational bird:
The starling caught the eye of not only Shakespeare but also Aristotle,
Pliny and Tennyson. Mozart had a pet starling,
and one of the themes of his piano concerto in G is based on the bird's
whistle.

Nest disinfectants:
Starlings select specific plant leaves, such as the goldenrod, above, and
incorporate them into their nests. Volatile
herbal compounds significantly reduce the presence of parasites and
bacteria.

Bills built for prying:
Unlike most perching birds, starlings open their beaks with much greater
force than they close them -- the protractor
muscles are huge. Skulls narrow prominently at the front, allowing eyes to
move forward as the beak opens, giving the
bird a good look into the pried opening.

SOURCES: Life Histories of North American Wagtails, Shrikes, Vireos and
Their Allies, Bent; Blackbirds of the Americas,
Orians and Angell; "Use of Nest Material as Insecticidal and
Anti-pathogenic Agents by the European Starling,"
Oecologia, Clark and Mason; In Quest of Starlings, Beecher.



Jim McCoy
jfmccoy at earthlink.net
Redmond, WA