Starling Talk members have learned from sad experience that if you have a starling loose in the house, you must avoid leaving glasses of any liquid on the counter so that your bird will not lean in to drink it, get its wings pinned, and drown; close the toilet lid before flushing so the curious bird does not follow the entrancing swirl down the pipe; take care in using the garbage disposal; make sure before you turn on the microwave that your bird has not somehow slipped in; refrain from chopping vegetables with large knives, as starlings cannot help investigating with tiny bills and toes that are all too easy to inadvertently slice off. You have to watch your step—starlings are so completely at home with their human flock-families that they are constantly underfoot, and it’s easy to accidentally trample their tiny, hollow-boned little bodies. One day I couldn’t find Carmen anywhere, and finally, after about an hour of searching, I took a break, deciding she was probably napping somewhere and would turn up when she was ready. Besides, I was getting hungry. When I opened the refrigerator to get the peanut butter for my sandwich, she jumped off the shelf next to the eggs and rushed to my shoulder. She tried to shake the cold off her feathers, and I tucked her under my shirt to thaw. Poor little thing. I can’t imagine how she jumped in there without my knowing, but other than being a bit chilled, she seemed fine.
I almost sweep Carmen into the dustpan pretty much every day. She likes to play right under the path of the broom. (Photograph by Tom Furtwangler)
Starlings bring this bright curiosity to the exploration of their world, and the only habitats in North America that starlings avoid are large expanses of wooded or forested areas, arid chaparral, and desert. Ornithologist Paul Cabe proclaims that given the starling’s omnivorous diet and ability to make use of buildings as nest sites, no native bird in North America, not even the crow, is better adapted to the urban wilds than this invader. It took starlings just eighty years after their release in Central Park to populate the entire continent. Eugene Schieffelin lived to realize that his starling introduction succeeded, but he could not have predicted how the story would unfold over the next century. What would Schieffelin make of his triumph now? In Tinkering with Eden, Kim Todd suggests that he ought to have read his revered Shakespeare more closely. In Henry IV, “the starling was not a gift to inspire romance or lyric poetry. It was a bird to prod anger, to pick at a scab, to serve as a reminder of trouble. It was a curse.” Perhaps even Schieffelin would realize that no matter how pretty the starlings were, how mesmerizing their vast autumn cloud-flocks, here was an experiment that had gone terribly wrong.
Since that fateful introduction, starlings have made poor guests as they spread across the country, and I regret to admit that Carmen is no exception. The first time we had to go out of town and leave Carmen for several days, I wasn’t sure what to do. I could have just had someone come in to feed her and change the newspapers that line her cage, but since starlings are so social, I worried about her becoming neurotically lonely and pulling out her feathers, as isolated parrots do. My friend Trileigh Tucker is a geology professor, birdwatcher, naturalist, and Crazy Cat Lady (just five at the moment). I knew she would be the perfect starling-sitter, and Trileigh kindly (or maybe naively) agreed. I coaxed Carmen into Delilah’s kitty-travel box and loaded her old rolling cage into the back of the Subaru—this would be her guest room. At Trileigh’s house I gently held the kitty box and (remembering Mozart’s journey with boxed-up Star from the bird shop to his home) whispered encouragement to the horrified Carmen, while Trileigh and her tolerant partner, Rob, gingerly maneuvered the cage up their narrow stairway and into Trileigh’s home office. Carmen settled in quickly and I left feeling reassured.
Upon our return, Trileigh informed me that Carmen’s first act as a houseguest when she was let out of her cage was to fly to the aquarium, perch on its edge, and, quick as a great blue heron, pluck out a shining purple guppy. It happened “instantly,” Trileigh marveled, before she had time to blink. Carmen always knows when she has taken something she isn’t supposed to have, and she flew with her prize to the top of a bookshelf, out of reach. Trileigh yelled and waved her arms helplessly as Carmen swallowed the guppy. In spite of this bad behavior, Carmen was invited back, and Trileigh has claimed the dubious distinction of starling auntie.
Carmen was acting true to her species’ form. Starlings have behaved atrociously in their New World. They feast in great flocks on agricultural crops—wheat sprouts, young corn, apples, cherries, and berries. They lurk by the tens of thousands around corporate agriculture facilities and binge on feed in the troughs of cattle and swine, picking out the most nutritious bits and leaving the dross for the farm animals. According to an estimate by Cornell University researchers, in the U.S., starlings cause eight hundred million dollars in agricultural damage every year.
But the harm from starlings extends far beyond the agricultural realm. Their swirling skyborne murmurations spiral down into roosts on urban buildings and at suburban park edges, creating noise, odor, and filth. Starling feces in some populations may contain histoplasmosis, a fungus that affects humans and other mammals; any resulting illness is usually so minor that it is undetectable, but the fungus can lead to respiratory infections and, in extreme cases, pneumonia, blindness, and even death.*
In 1960, a Lockheed L-188 Electra serving Eastern Airlines Flight 375 took off from Boston’s Logan Airport for Philadelphia and other points south. Seconds after takeoff, the plane collided with a flock of twenty thousand starlings. Hundreds of birds were sucked into the machinery; two of the four engines lost power, and the plane plunged into the sea. Sixty-two people died, including several who were in town for a shoe-sales conference. After the crash, officials tested seasoned pilots on flight simulators to see if any of them could have saved the plane in such a scenario. All failed. In more testing, live starlings were thrown into running engines. It was found that just three or four birds could cause a dangerous power drop. The crash of Flight 375 ushered in a sense of realism that shook the industry and the imagination of a country that, in 1960, was still enamored of air travel. There are multiple stories of starling-airplane collisions, but this is one of the few that resulted in an actual crash or human injury. It remains the worst crash caused by a collision with birds in airline history. After the crash, wildlife-management plans became part of airport construction and maintenance. Even so, aircraft collisions with starling flocks, or sometimes just the threat of such collisions, result in occasional unscheduled landings, delayed departures, and expensive repairs.
Human deaths are serious, but this crash was a long time ago; most birders know nothing about it and hate starlings anyway. Beyond the costly crop damage, beyond the excrement that collects beneath urban roosts, and beyond the trees full of loud screeching birds, starlings are despised above all else in conservation circles for their ability to outcompete native birds for food and, more important, a limited number of nest sites. Starlings are cavity nesters, and early each spring they will start investigating crevices in buildings, homes, and birdhouses, as well as holes that have been carved into trees and electrical poles by woodpeckers. They compete directly for these prized sites with the other cavity nesters, including chickadees, bluebirds, and swallows.
Self-proclaimed starling vigilantes across the country have taken matters into their own hands. One woman on a Seattle birders’ forum proudly catches starlings in Havahart traps, then drowns them; she is downright gleeful when reporting that some of the birds die from overheating in cages left exposed to hours of sun or from fright-inspired little starling heart attacks so she doesn’t even have to dunk them. (Havaharts are cages that trap animals without killing them, ironically named in this case.) She urges us all to follow her good example.
On a much wider scale, farmers, government agencies, conservation organizations, and urban businesses fed up with destruction, poop, and noise have for decades been attempting to eradicate, or at least decrease, starling populations. Imaginative but failed efforts have included elab
orate traps; explosives; plastic owls; spreading itching powder over foraging areas; irradiating birds with cobalt-60; amplifying starling distress calls; various poisons; toxic chemical sprays; firing pyrotechnics over roosting areas; laying live wire in gathering places to electrocute starlings through their tiny feet; and spraying flocks with a wetting potion that won’t dry until the birds freeze to death. The chemical salt DRC-1339, trademarked as Starlicide by Ralston-Purina in the 1960s, kills starlings horribly over a period of days by uremic poisoning. It remains in wide use. In 2015, U.S. government agents killed over a million starlings—more than any other so-called nuisance species.* That number is typical for a given year, but the annual killings have made no dent in starling populations. And they never will. There are simply too many starlings, and they are too good at reproducing and surviving for population-level efforts to be effective. “It’s sort of like bailing the ocean with a thimble,” lamented the late Richard Dolbeer, who was a well-known wildlife official in Ohio. Instead, we need to address the much more difficult task of thinking ecologically, of creating human-inhabited areas that are less inviting to starlings and that allow native birds to flourish.
Meanwhile, though I am not a starling apologist (I wish them eradicated from the country as much as anyone—as long as Carmen stays here with me), it is important to consider a few emerging facts about starlings. First, while their populations grew and spread exponentially for decades, they have for the last thirty years or so been stable. In most places, starling counts are no longer increasing. Every species has a carrying capacity—a number of individuals that can thrive in a given place without exhausting the necessary resources. Starling populations seem to have peaked.
Further, at least some of the species’ impact on native birdlife may turn out to be more perceived than real. Any observant neighborhood birdwatcher has seen starlings behaving badly to the nicer little birds, so the anecdotal evidence against starlings is strong. Not only do they claim the best cavity nest sites early in the spring, but they sometimes actually invade a nest that is already inhabited by a native bird, throw the bird out in a flurry of snapping bills and slapping wings (occasionally killing the bird; usually not), destroy the bird’s eggs, and make themselves at home. But a respected study reveals that rather than giving up, many of these displaced birds simply nest elsewhere. In 2002, researchers at Berkeley completed a years-long survey designed to document the impact of starlings on native birds. To their amazement, they were not able to determine quantifiable harm. Historical population records for the twenty-seven cavity-nesting species believed to be most at risk from starlings were examined from pre-starling times to the present; the species included woodpeckers, kestrels, swallows, flycatchers, and bluebirds. Most of the species’ populations showed no decline, not even the red-bellied woodpecker’s, a species of most concern because nest usurpation by starlings has long been observed and recorded. Five species in the group showed insignificant declines, and five species’ populations actually increased, but none of these changes appeared to be directly linked to the presence of starlings.
I asked lead author Walter Koenig, now at Cornell, how he felt about the study’s findings, which he’d known would be unpopular in conservation circles, where the hatred of starlings is an unquestioned—almost cherished—conviction. “I’m not sure I was surprised by the results,” he told me, “but I was a tad annoyed.” Dr. Koenig studies acorn woodpeckers, and starlings will often usurp the only nests in his study site. He is the last person who would want to exonerate these birds. Still, he cannot claim that his woodpeckers’ overall populations are affected. “The bottom line,” says Koenig, “is that we know that starlings are quite aggressive and compete for nest cavities with a whole slew of native species. But the evidence that this competition has led to significant population declines is pretty slim, at best.” Yet like most ornithologists, he isn’t about to go soft on starlings: “I certainly can’t say that’s changed my attitude toward them; I still don’t hesitate to shoot them when I have the chance.”
In 1939, a not-yet-famous Rachel Carson penned an essay entitled “How About Citizenship Papers for the Starling?” In it she argued that instead of seeing the bird as an invader, people should accept starlings as a regular species in the native avifauna and give up talk of “invasive” and “nonnative.” After all, the bird was here to stay and was, moreover, earning its keep, since starlings feast gluttonously on cutworms, an agricultural menace. (As naturalist George Laycock put it, “Starlings do nothing in moderation.”) Carson’s notion is echoed in the stance of some modern conservationists, who are turning a corner in the way they think about some invasives. There are many invasive species, like the starling, that are simply ineradicable; instead of spending time and effort worrying about such species, the argument runs, we should accept them as part of the changing modern landscape and move on to issues that we can actually do something about.
Koenig’s results notwithstanding, I believe that such thinking leads to a dangerous complacency. Yes, starlings are a permanent part of the urban landscape, and I absolutely do not support harming individual birds (I won’t be picking up a shotgun anytime soon). But like Koenig, I am not ready to quit defending native habitats from this invasive species. For one thing, though Koenig’s study is a good one, it is not definitive. He recognizes that the historical data he examined may not have been gathered consistently and that if the study had continued, we would likely find that starling competition, alongside native habitat loss from human growth, negatively affects some species—not just the cavity nesters, but also the less aggressive songbirds that feed in areas where starling numbers are high. Of course, all the other impacts of starlings, including those on large and small farms, remain unquestioned. But in terms of conservation, the most significant point to remember is that starlings thrive in areas that are disturbed by human presence, including dense urban environments—places that more sensitive species simply cannot survive in the long term. For now, it seems some birds go elsewhere when their nests are usurped by starlings. But as human sprawl continues, good habitat areas are getting smaller and smaller and may someday disappear altogether. What happens when there is no “elsewhere”? Do we shrug our shoulders and accept that we have created a world in which only starlings and a few other robust species can manage to thrive?
Regarding starlings, we can all share responsibility for keeping their numbers to a minimum by covering tubes and other openings on our homes that provide possible nest sites; putting up nest boxes with holes suitable for chickadees, swallows, and bluebirds but too small for starlings; and removing the starling nests and eggs that do appear. But our task is not simply to get rid of starlings. We need to design human landscapes that are hospitable to more species of native birds. This means less grass and more trees. We need to lobby for the creation and protection of woodland parks and forests on large and small scales.
Recent studies on the presence of trees show us two beautiful and related facts: that even a few trees in urban neighborhoods will increase the diversity of bird species, and that people who live near trees are healthier—both mentally and physically—than those who don’t. A treed landscape benefits birds and humans together. In addition to starlings, some native birds (robins, flickers, and of course crows) seem to manage well in suburban areas with huge expanses of grass. But yards with trees—any trees at all—attract more varieties of native birds, as if by magic. Wrens, chickadees, tanagers, woodland thrushes, woodpeckers of all kinds. It is so simple for all of us to take part in the re-wilding of the places we live every day, to increase beauty, and wilderness, and wildness, even on the smallest scales.
In 1939, when Rachel Carson wrote her essay suggesting people learn to accept starlings, there were far fewer of them around. It is difficult to imagine that Carson, an early ecologist and a lover of birds, would have maintained this position in light of the starlings’ increase and impact in the decades to follow (and while backyard starlings mig
ht actually benefit our gardens, in agricultural areas, they do more harm than good, no matter how many cutworms they eat). Still, it is thought-provoking to ponder this defense of the country’s most despised bird coming from one of its most revered nature writers and defenders.
I do know that Carson would have loved meeting Carmen—it was always a delight for her to interact with individual wild animals, and she was enamored of birds. It would have enchanted her to have Carmen light on her shoulder, poop on her pale blue cashmere sweater, and peck at her midcentury clip-on earrings. Wild starlings fascinated her, too, and her field books contained meticulous notes and sketches of their morphology, behavior, and unique foraging habits.
Like anyone who has spent time observing starlings, Carson perceived that wild starlings work hard for their food. Most birds that eat grubs and worms search for them visually or peck at the earth with a closed bill to seek out nutritious treats. Starlings actually create holes in the earth by poking their closed bills into the ground, then using their extra-strong mandibular abductor muscles—the muscles that open the bill—to excavate a hole in which to search for wormy prey. We can discover where starlings have been feasting on our lawns and in our parks by the presence of these gape holes. Starling bodies are built for this; their squat, strong legs keep them close to the ground, providing leverage and, of course, giving starlings their characteristic waddle.
This unique behavior is one of the things that helped starlings take over human-inhabited places. Wherever humans go, we spread grass in our wake—expansive urban parks, suburban lawns, golf courses, graveyards—and grass is the ideal substrate for the starling’s gape-foraging technique. But living with Carmen, I’ve discovered that the distinctive gaping behavior is related not just to how starlings eat, but also to how they learn.* Most birds explore their world by pecking at it; starlings gather information by gaping at things. If Carmen encounters something new or interesting, even something that is clearly not food, she doesn’t poke at it—she attempts to open it, placing the point of her closed bill on the spot she wants to investigate, then opening her bill quick and wide, over and over.
Mozart's Starling Page 5
