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Starlings are in North America because they were invited here nearly 140 years ago. The simple story is that a Manhattan socialite named Eugene Schieffelin imported nearly 200 caged starlings from Europe and set them free in Central Park between 1889 and 1891. In the ensuing decades, they raced across the continent, swirling platoons of noisy, hungry invaders in an unsuspecting land. It went well for the starlings, which are excellent adapters and stubborn survivors, and their coast-to-coast ranks eventually swelled to some 200 million. Today, though, the consensus amongst so many human neighbors—ornithologists, bird-watchers, farmers, airport managers, and building maintenance crews—is that these 3-ounce birds rank somewhere between a low-grade pest and a waking nightmare.
The question has been asked of Schieffelin time and again: What in the world was he thinking?
Contrary to popular lore, Schieffelin wasn’t trying to bring to America every bird ever mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare. That story’s been debunked, but the seeds of the starlings’ occupation were planted in a similarly misguided notion, at least from our 21st-century gaze. Schieffelin was not only a bird lover but a man of his time—and at the time the “acclimatization” movement had taken hold in pockets around the globe. The essential idea was that nature had not been perfected until the hand of man had made its contribution—specifically the importation of animals and plants from other lands for use as livestock, hunting quarry, food, or decoration. In America, the notion was largely expressed through birds. People who had recently arrived yearned for the avian life from back home, especially those valued as insect-eaters or trilling songsters. Skylarks, wrens, finches, and thrushes arrived in cages and were released around the country, either via formal acclimatization societies or people acting on their own. Schieffelin’s short-lived American Acclimatization Society in New York City did its part. Most of the birds set free didn’t survive long. Among the most notable exceptions were sparrows and starlings.
But had Schieffelin or anyone else in his camp bothered to consider the wisdom of bringing foreign species to America, they would’ve been well-served by a trip Down Under. Rabbits had been imported to Australia and New Zealand earlier that century to give Europeans something to hunt. The rabbits bred like, well, rabbits, and things famously spiraled out of control. New Zealand brought in stoats, cats, and other hunters to deal with the rabbits. Predictably those, too, got out of hand, soon feasting on native birds. Similar examples abound over the past century, including famously in Hawaii, where mongooses were brought in to control rats and in places like Puerto Rico or Australia, where imported cane toads set free in the hopes of controlling insects. Some 37,000 species have been transported (intentionally or not) to new regions over the past few centuries, according to the United Nations, and today pose a serious threat to native wildlife, ecosystems, economies, and human infrastructure. The cost for attempting to control invasive and nonnative species tops $420 billion each year.
Here, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that starlings may be the costliest bird in the country, causing around $1 billion in damage to agriculture operations every year. They foul machinery, eat crops like wine grapes and cherries, gobble up food meant for cows, and generally make a nuisance of themselves. That doesn’t include the cost to clean sidewalks, shoo them from airports, or keep them from roosting in suburban trees or city buildings. And then there’s what starlings do to native birds, crowding them out of nests and shouldering their way into food supplies. (So far, though, there’s no evidence of major, population-level effects on local birds.)
I guess I can’t fault Schieffelin’s desire for more birds and more bird songs, but nature has a way of making us pay for not thinking things through. Carelessness has a price in ways we often fail to imagine in the moment.
No sooner were starlings here that many people wanted them out. Easier said than done.
Our forever war against starlings over the past century has featured all manner of human ingenuity and desperation, each effort aimed at either killing these birds or shooing them away to make them someone else’s problem. Over the years, we’ve tried dynamite, Roman candles, fake owls, electrified cages, balloons, whips, teddy bears, and dirty diapers left in trees. We’ve put out poisoned bait and doused starling roosts with chemicals to strip their feathers of heat-retaining oils. Building ledges were coated with grease, shotguns fired into trees, fire hoses trained on offending flocks. We’ve deployed noise cannons and blasted recordings of distressed starlings. They’ve been chased out of church steeples, rousted from banks, and pursued by entrepreneurial Bird Men promising miracle results at an affordable price.
How can there be villains in nature, including something so charming and fully realized as a bird?
No species has been targeted more often by the federal government’s nuisance-wildlife agency than starlings. My number crunching found that between 2008 and 2022, the agency killed about 18.5 million starlings—that’s more than 1 million per year and more than 3,000 every single day on average. During that same time period, they chased away about 29,000 starlings each day.
And for all the effort, starlings are still everywhere. They’re smart, adaptable, breed quickly, and are one of nature’s great survivors. More often than not, the harassment of starlings typically just moves them down the line somewhere, either to the next city block or another farm down the road. Eradication? Good luck. “It’s sort of like bailing the ocean with a thimble,” one biologist told me.
Writing the history of a species—even one as new to North American as the starling—is a thorny affair. There are, of course, linear aspects to this story. The bird arrives, spreads, and irritates. A villain is cast and heroes attempt to right a wrong. If you squint long enough at it, there’s an arc that’s simple and easy to explain.
But linger and the complexities emerge. How can there be villains in nature, including something so charming and fully realized as a bird? And this man who released them, Schieffelin, he loved birds. Was he really such a fool to want more of them around? And suppose starlings propel the evolution of some of our native species in a way that makes them more adaptable to the world we’re so recklessly changing around them? What if there’s more to starlings, past and future, than we think we know?
Going further: Who decides what is a worthy species and what is not? Who decides who belongs on this continent and who doesn’t? How long to become a citizen? And does our calculus change over time?
I won’t pretend to have the answers, but I know starlings raise a lot of questions and lead us down alleys we may want to avoid. For one, I struggle to reconcile that the bird we so enthusiastically kill and harass is the same one whose swirling murmurations in the sky inspire art, leave so many in wonder, and caused ancient Romans to parse their shifting shapes in search of divine messages. Too, I worry about the skies that are emptying out all around us, a profound loss of birds that makes this place lonelier by the day. Do we really want to take more? The list goes on.
The truth, the whole truth if such a thing exists, resists reductions, reveals mysteries, and pokes at our beliefs as we struggle to become more human. Any history—be it natural, political, or personal—is never finished and never complete, and we should be glad for it. There are always revelations to be had and paradoxes to explore about ourselves and even the birds outside our windows waiting to be seen. 
Read an adapted excerpt from Mike Stark’s book Starlings: The Curious Odyssey of a Most Hated Bird here.
Lead photo by Somni4uk / Shutterstock
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