Shakespeare's Starlings: How Invasive Birds Took Over North America

It's Wednesday, September thirtieth. Every European starling in North America — somewhere between eighty-five and two hundred million birds, depending on the season — is descended from about one hundred birds released in Central Park in 1890 and 1891. They were brought here on purpose, by a man who wanted to give America every bird ever mentioned in a William Shakespeare play. The starling appears exactly once in all of Shakespeare's work. A single line. One throwaway threat from a hotheaded nobleman in a history play. And that was enough.

Eugene Schieffelin — that's SHEE-fel-in — was born in New York City in 1827, the seventh son of a prominent lawyer. His family was one of the oldest in Manhattan. He became a pharmacist, an amateur bird enthusiast, and eventually the chairman of something called the American Acclimatization Society.

Acclimatization societies were a nineteenth-century fad. The idea was to move plants and animals around the world, from one region to another, to make them useful in new places. Europeans brought crops and livestock to their colonies. Collectors wanted exotic species in their gardens and parks. Nobody really understood what could go wrong when you dropped a species into an ecosystem it had never encountered before. They thought they were improving nature — giving it more to work with.

Schieffelin had a particular project in mind. He wanted to introduce every bird species mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare to North America.

He tried nightingales. They didn't survive. He tried skylarks. Also dead. Species after species failed to take. Then, on March 6, 1890, he brought sixty European starlings from England and released them in Central Park. It was snowing that morning, turning to sleet. There was no reason to think these birds would do any better than the others.

He released another forty the following year.

Those roughly one hundred birds found shelter under the eaves of the American Museum of Natural History, just west of the park. They survived the winter. They bred. And then they began to multiply.

So why starlings? What was the line?

In Henry the Fourth Part One, a character named Hotspur — a rebellious nobleman whose real name is Harry Percy — is furious at the king. The king has refused to ransom Hotspur's brother-in-law, a man named Mortimer, who was captured in battle. Hotspur is ranting to his uncle about what he's going to do to get revenge. And he says this:

"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."

His plan is to buy a starling, teach it to say one word — Mortimer — over and over and over, and give it to the king as a living, squawking torture device. A bird that never stops repeating the name of the enemy the king refused to save.

That's it. That's the entire Shakespearean justification for introducing a species that would reshape the ecology of an entire continent. A bitter joke in Act 1, Scene 3.

Now, a note of honesty. The Shakespeare motivation might not be the whole truth. Some historians argue it was attached to Schieffelin decades after his death — a writer named Edwin Way Teale made the claim in 1948 without direct evidence. The acclimatization society's own records from the time talk about birds that were "useful to the farmer and contributed to the beauty of the groves and fields." No mention of Shakespeare. And Schieffelin wasn't even the first person to try releasing starlings in North America. There were at least ten recorded attempts before his.

But here's what is true: Schieffelin was a Shakespeare enthusiast. He absolutely did release the birds. And whether or not the Bard was his primary motivation, the story endures for a reason. A dead playwright's single sentence — a joke in a history play about a medieval rebellion — accidentally reshaped a continent's wildlife.

The starlings spread fast. From Central Park, they expanded at a rate of about fifty-five miles per year. By 1920, they'd reached the Mississippi. By the 1940s, they were on the West Coast. Today, they're in every state, every Canadian province, Alaska, Mexico, the Bahamas, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Jamaica. Genetic testing confirms that every single one traces back to the New York introductions.

They are, objectively, a disaster.

The USDA estimates European starlings cause at least eight hundred million dollars in agricultural damage every year, and some estimates put it closer to a billion. They descend on fruit crops — cherries, grapes, blueberries — and strip them bare. They eat livestock feed and contaminate what they don't eat. They carry diseases that spread to cattle: salmonella, E. coli, Johne's disease. The soil beneath their roosts grows a fungus that can cause a lung infection in humans.

They're also aggressive nesters. They kick native birds — bluebirds, woodpeckers, swallows — out of their nesting cavities. They destroy eggs and kill fledglings. The species has been nominated to the list of the hundred worst invasive species on the planet. Only two other birds made that list.

In October of 1960, the consequences turned deadly. On the evening of October fourth, Eastern Airlines Flight 375 took off from Boston's Logan Airport. Six seconds after leaving the runway, the plane — a Lockheed Electra with seventy-two people on board — flew directly into a flock of roughly twenty thousand starlings. Birds poured into three of the four engines. Two lost power. A third flamed out entirely. The plane was barely a hundred twenty feet in the air. It rolled left, stalled, and punched into Winthrop Bay almost vertically. Sixty-two people died. Ten survived. It remains the deadliest bird strike in American history.

Investigators found more than a hundred dead starlings on the runway the next morning. To understand what had happened, they later fired anesthetized starlings into identical engines to measure the damage. That's how seriously they took a bird that weighs about three ounces.

After that crash, the FAA introduced mandatory bird ingestion standards for aircraft engines. Airport wildlife management became a standardized discipline. Every modern jet engine you've ever flown on was tested against the thing that happened when one man opened a cage in Central Park in 1890.

There's a coda to this story that comes from a hundred years before Schieffelin. In 1784, Mozart bought a starling from a pet shop in Vienna. He wrote the purchase in his expense book, alongside a transcription of a melody the bird had been singing. That melody was the opening theme of the third movement of his Piano Concerto Number 17 in G major — except the bird had changed a couple of the notes. Mozart wrote underneath it, "That was beautiful."

The starling lived with him for three years. When it died in June of 1787, Mozart held a funeral. He invited mourners in formal dress. He wrote a poem. It begins: "A little fool lies here whom I held dear."

Two men, separated by an ocean and a century, both enchanted by the same bird — a glossy black mimic with an iridescent sheen. One wrote it into a concerto. The other let it loose on a continent. One act you can hear in a concert hall. The other you can see from any highway in America.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.