More on Starlings

In this photo the Northern Flicker is pulling a European Starling from the flicker's nest in a tree in Shakespeare Garden.

I cobbled together the information below from several sources but, unfortunately, forgot to note the authors. I am searching for the author, but in the meantime, I thought it might enlighten:

"Shakespeare's plays are full of references to birds and in 1890 a drug manufacturer named Eugene Scheiffelin decided that New York's Central Park should be home to all Shakespeare's songbirds. He brought thrushes and skylarks from England and released them in the park. They failed to fight their way into our ecology.

He also released 60 starlings into Central Park. A year later he released 40 more. This time his romantic gesture was a success. And what a success it was! For six years the starlings stayed in Manhattan. New Yorkers were delighted when they showed up in the eaves of the Museum of Natural History.

Then they flew out into America. They reached the Mississippi River by 1928, and California by 1942. Starlings have powerful staying power. Today they're at home in both Alaska and Florida. They reproduce with alarming speed. They drive off bluebirds and woodpeckers and form flocks of as many as a million hungry birds. A flock will eat 20 tons of potatoes and can wipe out a farmer's corn crop in a matter of few days.

In 1960 a Lockheed Electra stirred up 10,000 starlings as it left Boston's airport. The plane went straight into the flock. Its engines strangled on starlings and 62 people died.

Attempts to fight the infestation show the same off-the-wall imagination that brought starlings here in the first place. In 1948 Washington, D.C., tried to run them off with artificial owls. Starlings were too smart for that. When engineers strung electric wires around the Capitol columns, the birds just moved next door. We've tried broadcasting the starlings' alarm call. We've used chemicals, cobalt-60, and even Roman candles. In 1931 the Department of Agriculture even put out a recipe for starling pie.

Nothing has worked and the starling has found a home in America that's much to his liking. We're left with a message we should take to heart: Our actions are not always irreversible."

A century ago, such a small thing as a romantic dream about Shakespeare's world in Central Park brought us a plague of starlings. Our stewardship of the environment means we must look much further ahead at the results of our actions.