Constanze had plenty of wit. She possessed an artistic spirit and a solid temperament. And in spite of the largeness of her husband’s personality, she held on to a sense of bright independence. She traveled and managed parts of the household music business. Mozart wrote songs for her lovely soprano voice. She governed the couple’s ever-changing financial situation as well as anyone could and maintained relative equanimity amid the chaos of composing, parties, recitals, pregnancies, children, and the labors of middle-class eighteenth-century domestic life in dusty Vienna. Though Leopold was predisposed to find fault, even he commented on Constanze’s commonsense home economics after his visit to the young couple’s apartments. Wolfgang and Constanze’s marriage was not without troubles, but it was a sweet one, and happy overall.
Star joined the family in the middle of the marriage, during the most musically productive, prosperous, and engaging years of Mozart’s life. He might have been the smallest member of the household and is barely mentioned in most biographies, if he makes it in at all, but the starling is never far from the center of Mozart’s unfolding story. Any Mozart historian would give an arm for this bird’s-eye view of these years. Star’s vocal acrobatics accompanied the composition of at least eight piano concertos, three symphonies, and The Marriage of Figaro. He was present for Leopold’s ten-week visit to the young couple’s house, the only visit the elder Mozart would ever make. Star heard, and likely joined in singing with, the debut of the Haydn Quartets, performed in the parlor with Papa Haydn himself in attendance. Star was present in the house during the birth of Carl Thomas, in 1784, and Johann Thomas Leopold, in 1786. He witnessed, with his inquisitive starling’s eye, the mourning in the household when tiny Johann Thomas died at just three weeks old. Star has been considered a footnote to the Mozart biography, but after living with a starling, I have become convinced that the bird brought a constant current of liveliness, hope, and good cheer into these complex years, one that sustained Mozart’s heart and music.
Three years after Mozart brought Star home, his father, Leopold, passed away, leaving his son with a knotted mixture of guilt, mourning, and relief. Mozart did not travel to the memorial in Salzburg, where Leopold was buried without mourners. Mozart’s starling died just two months later, and in honor of the bird, Mozart organized a formal funeral, donned his most elegant finery, recruited friends as velvet-caped mourners, and penned an affectionate elegy. My favorite translation is Marcia Davenport’s, from her 1932 biography of Mozart, now out of print; it captures the simultaneous jocularity and formality of the little verse. After a few lines that announce the starling’s death, Wolfgang laments:
Thinking of this, my heart
Is riven apart.
Oh reader! Shed a tear,
You also, here.
He was not naughty, quite,
But gay and bright,
And under all his brag
A foolish wag.
The poem shows that Mozart had become thoroughly acquainted with the typical starling personality—bright, personable, charming, mischievous. Some historians have claimed that the funeral verses are simply a farce, but no one who has lived with a starling would dream of making such a suggestion.
Three
UNINVITED GUEST, UNEXPECTED WONDER
When Carmen was four weeks old and flapping about her aquarium, I realized that she needed a larger home. We moved her downstairs into a big cage on wheels. She still spent hours each day outside the cage, cuddling with all of us and practicing her emerging flight skills. Starlings are insatiably social and Carmen would call piteously when we were out of her sight. When she needed to be in the cage (on hot days when we had to have the windows open, or when we were cooking in the kitchen with dangerously boiling water, or when we were eating and wanted to keep her out of our food), we just wheeled it to wherever we were in the house so she could see us and chatter with us.
By about this age, starlings have pretty much finished growing. They get, if anything, a little smaller as they mature, shedding baby fat and acquiring an adult sleekness. But they do get busier and more active. Though Carmen’s cage was the largest I could find, I couldn’t imagine keeping her there for long. My super-handy dad, Jerry, came to stay for a few days to help me design and build a custom aviary in the corner of our mudroom—a room within a room. I made sure Carmen’s cage was in view as we worked so she could observe our progress on her new home. Maybe if she watched it being built, it wouldn’t seem too big and ominous when she moved in.
We made a sturdy frame with two-by-two-inch raw-cedar posts, used lighter one-by-twos for struts, and neatly stapled metal-grid “hardware cloth,” as it’s called, to the outside of the structure (rather than the inside, to keep Carmen from getting her toenails stuck in the staples). We fit the whole enclosure in the corner of the mudroom, a spacious throughway between the kitchen and dining room, so that Carmen could see us and hear us in the places where we spent most of our time. The aviary reached from the floor to the ceiling, and the back wall ran along a huge window with a view of trees, birds, and sky. The raw wood and metal had a pleasing, natural look, and I added tree limbs for perches.*
It took two days of dawn-to-dark cutting and pounding, several trips to the hardware store, and lots of swearing on the part of my dad, but finally the beautiful aviary was ready. Jerry and I surveyed our handiwork, high-fived, and poured a celebratory beer. But Carmen was wary. Starlings are like cats—though they are brave and inquisitive, they also like routine, and this was a whole new world.
Carmen full grown at six weeks, and feathered out in her gray juvenal plumage. (Photograph by Tom Furtwangler)
While Jerry finished his beer, I decided it was time to introduce our little bird to her new home. I stood in the aviary’s doorway with Carmen on my shoulder. Her eyes grew large. I stepped inside and stayed there with her among the branches so she could get her bearings. I could feel her feet tighten uncertainly on my shoulder, but after about fifteen minutes I gently coaxed her onto a branch and slipped out the door. She squeezed into the highest corner and stayed there, silent and overwhelmed, for about an hour. The next hour she began to explore quietly. By the third hour Carmen had taken full possession of her aviary and was hopping confidently from perch to perch.
There are tiny mirrors and all kinds of toys that I switch out daily to keep her interested (her favorites are empty milk cartons on the floor that she can overturn and stomp on and plastic bottles that she can practice rolling around on). There is lots of room to fly and explore. As frequently as possible, I leave the door open so she can come and go as she likes, but even then she will often just hang out in her aviary, sometimes flying between my shoulder and her favorite branch and back again. “Good flying!” I tell her, wanting to encourage healthy exercise. The aviary is her home, her safe place. When she is alarmed, or bored, or sleepy, or preening after a bath, that is where she wants to be. And when she steals things from the household that she is not supposed to (like thumbtacks or money), that is where she goes to hide them.
We designed the door to be big enough for humans to walk through, for ease of cleaning, and as we worked, we decided to make it a Dutch door, two half-doors, one on top of the other. We thought this would make the door less unwieldy and help it maintain its integrity on the hinges over time, but it turns out to be one of Carmen’s favorite things about her home—she likes to have the top door open so she can perch on the closed bottom door and survey her domain. She is a bit shy of new people, and this is where she prefers to sit—on her split-level door—when guests visit. Here she can get a good look at the interloper but still be able to make a quick getaway to the comfort of her favorite branch inside the aviary if she gets scared. Meanwhile, it is a nice place for guests to view her without looking through cage wires.
Soon after we finished the aviary, Carmen began her first molt, from her plain gray juvenal plumage to her first adult plumage. Every day she became more spotted and glistening. One of the most frequent comm
ents I hear about Carmen is “But she’s so pretty. This isn’t what all starlings look like.” It seems that because starlings are so despised, they are also expected to be ugly, or at least plain. Carmen is more beautiful to me than other starlings are because I know her personality and have grown fond of her. But as starlings go, she is no great looker. If anything, she is a bit spindly, as her pectoral muscles are not well formed due to a lack of extended flight. She is tidy and clean, but so are all healthy young birds.
First fresh, starry adult plumage. (Photograph by Tom Furtwangler)
I think the thing that most surprises people about Carmen is her glitteriness. Like all starlings’, Carmen’s plumage is iridescent—muted black when seen from one angle but coming to shimmery life when seen from a slightly different one or in a certain slant of light. Starlings are painted like oil slicks, layered with shining purple, blue, magenta, and green. Iridescence in feathers is created through structural changes in the feather surface that make them appear vibrant at certain angles—microscopic bumps and ridges on the barbs and barbules refract and scatter light. The gorget of a hummingbird—garnet at one glance, brown at another—is the crown-jewel example.
When starlings molt in the fall, many of their fresh iridescent feathers are tipped with white, giving the birds their celestial pattern. But the structural changes that make starling feathers iridescent also give the feathers added strength, protecting them from extremes of light and weather. Without the reinforcing benefits of coloration, the starling’s white tips wear off in the winter, leaving the birds all glistening black in the spring. It’s a unique strategy for acquiring breeding plumage—most songbirds molt into bright new breeding feathers to attract a mate in the spring, but starlings simply wear away their white to come up with a glimmery new look for the season.* To birds, most of which can see on the ultraviolet spectrum invisible to humans, iridescent starling bodies literally glow. Even if you don’t have UV vision, a starling in sunlight is absolutely stunning.
Even in black-and-white, the details of a starling’s plumage are wondrous. From top to bottom, this close-up shows the small covert feathers over the wing, the shorter secondary wing feathers, the long-lined edges of the primary wing feathers, and the pointed breast feathers. (Photograph by Tom Furtwangler)
It is intriguing that a bird so common, likely the bird most often seen by city dwellers, is so little understood, or even recognized. In spite of the starling’s unique, sparkling plumage, the majority of people, including urbanites who live alongside starlings every day, cannot accurately identify them. Many confuse starlings with the much less sparkly blackbirds, or even with baby crows. (All three of these birds are in the large Passeriformes order of so-called songbirds, but other than that, they are not closely related, and baby crows, once they are walking about, are no smaller than adult crows.)
The starling species common in North America is the European starling, one of the Old World Sturnidae family, a group that includes more than a hundred species of starlings, mynas, and oxpeckers spread across Europe, Asia, and Africa. All starling species are shimmery, precocious, terrestrial, gregarious, vocal birds, all of them iridescent, many of them extremely colorful—shades of cobalt, magenta, and brightest yellow. The superb starling of East Africa is among the most stunning small birds in the world, with brilliant turquoise and black plumage and shining golden eyes. One of them stole a piece of my sandwich as I was picnicking beneath a tree overlooking Lake Manyara in Tanzania. At first, the starling seemed quite polite about it, stepping up and tilting his head to one side, looking at me with his sun-yellow eye. I half expected him to say, “May I please have just a bit of crust? Perhaps a nibble of that lettuce?” But then he jumped in and took a bite so fast I hardly saw it happen. The native range of the European starling extends across all of temperate Europe and West Asia, but the species has been introduced in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, and North America, and the birds have spread just about everywhere else except, thankfully, the neotropics, where their impact on delicate native songbird populations could prove devastating.
Regarding the presence of starlings in North America, some blame Shakespeare. In the 1800s, “acclimatization societies” began to form across the country, following successful models in France. It was a vulnerable time for many newcomers to America, who were homesick and hungry for the arts, literature, flowers, and birds of their homeland. The aim of the societies was to introduce European species that would be “interesting and useful” to the seemingly deprived New World species that would offer aesthetic and sentimental inspiration through beauty and song.
Eugene Schieffelin was a pharmacist who lived in the Bronx. He was an eccentric, an Anglophile, and a Shakespeare aficionado. Some say he was also an ecological criminal and a lunatic, but I would argue for a gentler description; perhaps “flawed.” As deputy of the American Acclimatization Society of New York, Schieffelin, it is believed, latched onto the personal goal of bringing every bird mentioned in the works of Shakespeare to Central Park. Armed with his treasured copy of the exquisite Ornithology of Shakespeare, an 1871 volume in which James Edmund Harting assembled every allusion to birdlife in the whole of the Shakespeare canon, Schieffelin zeroed in on the Bard’s single reference to a starling, in Henry IV. It is a decisive scene: King Henry commands that the willful soldier Hotspur free his prisoners, but Hotspur replies that he will do nothing of the kind until the king agrees to pay the ransom that will free Hotspur’s brother-in-law Mortimer from the enemy. The king flies into a fury and forbids him to mention Mortimer’s name. After the king’s exit, Hotspur imagines a fanciful retribution, and here enters our star:
He said he would not ransom Mortimer;
Forbad my tongue to speak of Mortimer;
But I will find him when he lies asleep,
And in his ear I’ll holloa, “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.
Shakespeare was attentive to birdlife; larks, nightingales, and chaffinches wing and sing their way through the plays and sonnets, and in his unique Ornithology, Harting cataloged every one and quoted the lines in which they appear. The acclimatization societies did in fact try to bring in many of these species, but with the obsessive powers of a true eccentric, Schieffelin fixated on this one slender reference to the starling. Introductions of Shakespearean chaffinches, nightingales, and skylarks, and earlier efforts by Schieffelin to establish starlings, had resulted in nothing but cold, starved dead birds. Eugene resolved that his next starling attempt would not fail.
In 1890, he paid out a princely sum from his private stores (surely enough to satisfy Mortimer’s ransom) to purchase eighty starlings from an English source, and he perhaps laid out a bit extra to ensure that they would be well tended on their long journey to the New York port, where Schieffelin met them in person, enlisting help from his houseman to carry their crates. He released his bewildered birds on a snowy March day in the middle of Central Park. I think of him there—gloved, worried, flush with hope and an honest, if misguided, love. The release could not have been all he’d envisioned. The birds would have been tentative in the cold and the snow, perching uncertainly in the leafless maples. This was not the romantic bursting into flight that Schieffelin had surely imagined. But eventually the birds lifted into the gray winter skies. Genetic research in sample populations across the continent leads ornithologists to believe that all of the two hundred million–some starlings in North America, including my little Carmen, are descendants of Schieffelin’s birds.* (It’s interesting to note that our starlings have quantifiably less genetic variation than starlings in their native European range. This is in line with what evolutionary biologists call the “founder effect,” in which the number of animals introduced—in this case, Schieffelin’s eighty-odd birds—is not large enough to contain all the genetic variation o
f the original population.)
The spread of the starling was swift and complete. The Central Park birds dispersed into an emerging starling Shangri-la. They were accustomed to human presence and habitation in their home in England; the young city of New York would not have fazed them in the least. Some birds stayed close to Central Park; others flew to growing neighborhoods that provided warmth (sheltered buildings and perches above heated chimneys), food (human leftovers and leafy parks inhabited by tasty grubs and insects), nesting places (cavities created by building cornices and exhaust tubes), and ample foraging (grassy expanses in parks and gardens). Their progeny spread to other developing towns, first nearby, then farther and farther across the land. More descendants flocked to agricultural areas, where they easily found sustenance in the form of grain and fruit crops.
Starlings exhibit every characteristic of a successful animal invader: they are robust, aggressive, omnivorous, and unfussy about nest spots, and they reach sexual maturity at just nine months. They reproduce prolifically, with two clutches per season, sometimes more, and raise large broods of four to six chicks. (One clutch is the norm for most migrant songbirds, though nonmigratory resident birds in temperate climates—like robins and chickadees—will often raise two broods.) Starlings are inquisitive and intelligent, which makes them adaptable and ready to explore and colonize new places.
We know that curiosity killed the cat, and to make up for this, cats are granted nine lives. It is difficult to imagine a more brazenly curious creature than the starling, and to balance things out, it seems they ought to have nine thousand lives. People who live with starlings know this. There is a website administered from New York City called Starling Talk, where people who have starlings as pets gather to discuss matters such as the raising of baby starlings, starling health and diet, and the general wild craziness of life with a starling in the house. Nearly all the Starling Talkers came to have a starling because they found an injured or orphaned bird and, since starlings are unwanted by rehab centers, decided to take the care of the bird into their own hands. The discussion at the website is lively and, as with any obscure social coterie, often veers into the arcane and nerdy—matters that only other starling-keepers would care about or understand.
Mozart's Starling Page 4
