In 1890, American drug manufacturer and Shakespeare enthusiast Eugene Schifflin uncaged 60 European starlings here in New York City's Central Park. The starling is a small, seemingly innocuous bird, and Schifflin was chairman of the American Acclimatization Society, an organization that prided itself with introducing plants and animals from the old world of Europe to create comfort and familiarity in the new nation of America. Schifflin found comfort and familiarity in Shakespeare. So what could be better than to introduce every bird species mentioned in Shakespeare to America?
On a cold morning in March, he journeyed here to Central Park with 60 of the 100 starlings he'd imported from London, and that sounds like the start to a great story, but it doesn't go well. 100 years later, the New York Times article would sum up the starlings'effect on North America with a quote. Even noble intentions can lead to disaster when humanity meddles with nature, and that is arguably an understatement.
The Invasive Species Specialist Group releases a list of 100 of the world's worst alien invasive species, all from Earth to be clear, and the Starling has been on that list from 2004 to this day. As 20th century Americans would find out, These birds can adapt to pretty much anywhere, and when they do, they cause problems. But Schiffman couldn't have known all of that.
He didn't really expect the birds to thrive. The American Acclimatization Society had already introduced birds, mentioned in Shakespeare to Manhattan, and the streets weren't exactly overrun with nightingales and skylarks. The society and organizations like it had made previous attempts to introduce starlings to North America that had failed entirely.
Schifflin's attempt seemed inconsequential at first. In 1891, he released his 40 remaining birds and after a few years only 32 of the original 100 survived. But when the first pair successfully nested in the crevices of the Museum of Natural History, the starling population exploded.
When the birds left Manhattan, they took over. By 1928, there were starlings as far west as Mississippi. By 1942, they'd reached California. In the 1950s, there were 50 million starlings in the U.S. alone, and today there are an estimated 200 million starlings on the American continent.
And they all descended from 32 surviving birds, one man released here in Central Park. Our efforts to control the starling population started out innocently enough. In 1914, landowners of Connecticut put teddy bears in trees to try to scare them away. And when that didn't work, they fired rockets through the branches.
Over the decades, starlings became a federal problem. And throughout the 1960s, the US government killed over 9 million in Nevada and California alone. At the same time, The California Department of Agriculture experimented with killing starlings with cobalt-60. Later, officials in Rhode Island set off Roman candles near flocks. And perhaps most disturbingly, in the 1930s, the USDA proposed a very specific method of preparing starlings for meat pies.
In the US, the starling is one of the few bird species not protected by law and it shows. We have done some pretty terrible things to these birds. So here we are, well over a century of trouble later, all for one line in Henry IV. Except there is one problem.
Man introduces every bird mentioned in Shakespeare to America is a great story and it is deeply tied. to the starlings'lore. But it most likely isn't true. The narrative is unquestioned on New York's official website for invasive species and Brooklyn's website for its botanical gardens. It's listed as a fun fact on allaboutbirds.org, a popular birding website run in part by Cornell University, cited in multiple Wikipedia articles, and there is a very vivid account.
of Shifflin releasing the birds in a book called How Shakespeare Changed Everything by Stephen March. But while it is easy to prove, That Shifflin loved Shakespeare and he loved birds and the American Acclimatization Society released birds mentioned in Shakespeare, nothing connects those two very separate facts. Nothing published in Shifflin's lifetime proves anyone set out to release Shakespeare's birds to America. Nothing connects Shifflin and Shakespeare to Central Park.
The earliest evidence of this narrative I could find was in an essay by Edwin Way Teal titled In Defense of the Pesky Starling. It was first published in 1947 when the starling was on its way to peak peskiness. definitely needed some defending. Teal connected the Starling to Shakespeare and that made a good story.
Definitely better than our nation is trying to obliterate an entire species. So... The Shakespeare story is the one that's stuck, and it's the one we tell. In this very specific case, reframing the narrative reminds me of my favorite quote of all time by American acting pedagogue Lee Strasberg.
Anything can be seen poetically. It doesn't mean everything has meaning. It doesn't mean everything has a silver lining.
It's a reminder that we can find meaning in anything if we want to. Which is why the story of a chemist releasing birds in Central Park is not meaning... full because of a tenuous connection to Shakespeare, but in spite of it.
If the folklore isn't true, if Schiffle never intended to release Shakespeare's birds to America, his story is poetic in itself. Shi-Hun felt something important was missing from his life, so he put together all of his resources to do something that seemed impossible at the time, to make his world just a little bit better. For a while, it was. There was no way Chiffon could have known the full, devastating potential of an invasive species.
Still, for the Shakespeare enthusiast he was. He could have dug a little deeper into his favorite texts. I mean, if you sat through a production of Macbeth once, and even halfway paid attention, it's difficult to walk away without having noticed disrupting the natural order of things is almost always messy. And once you do, what's done is done.