{"id":665,"date":"2021-04-22T07:54:56","date_gmt":"2021-04-22T11:54:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=665"},"modified":"2021-04-22T07:54:56","modified_gmt":"2021-04-22T11:54:56","slug":"birdwatching","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2021\/04\/22\/birdwatching\/","title":{"rendered":"Birdwatching"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Eugene Schieffelin meant well.  All he wanted to do was honor his favorite playwright.

The German-born immigrant \u2013 and Shakespeare obsessive \u2013 yearned to introduce to America all the birds mentioned in the Bard\u2019s plays. 

At great personal expense, he imported hundreds of breeding pairs of non-native species and released them in New York City\u2019s Central Park.  No one was really surprised that most of them, including skylarks, lapwings, popinjays, and parakeets, vanished within a single generation. 

Unfortunately, one of the alien species looked around and said, \u201cThis will do quite nicely, thank you.\u201d 

On the brisk morning of March 6, 1890, Schieffelin and his servants released 60 European starlings.  A year later they added 40 more.  By 1940, starlings were spotted near the Mississippi River.  Today they can be found from coast to coast, Alaska to Mexico.  Ornithologists estimate their population at around 200 million.

Even if you\u2019re a bird lover, it\u2019s not easy to love starlings.  Short, stubby, and freckled with yellowish spots, they aren\u2019t particularly photogenic.  Michael Begier, a bird expert with the USDA, says, \u201cStarlings are lean and mean.  In the industry they\u2019re often called feathered bullets.\u201d 

Starlings are a bit like human teenagers.  They eat anything within reach.  An average starling will consume one to two times its body weight every day<\/em>.  They are annually responsible for something like $800 million of crop damage.  

Birds of a feather flock together, and starlings have been known to congregate in groups of tens of thousands.  Such gatherings have been given the wonderfully descriptive name \u201cmurmurations.\u201d  As you might guess, music lovers have never gone out of their way to record their unmelodic squawks.  In such large groups, starlings tend to drive away much-beloved native species like woodpeckers, flickers, and bluebirds.   

They have been known to carry a variety of diseases and have brought down at least one commercial airliner. 

Unsurprisingly, the starling is almost universally regarded as a \u201cnuisance bird,\u201d and is one of the only species in America not protected by law.

Here\u2019s the irony: Shakespeare only mentions starlings once<\/em>.  In Act I, Scene 3, of Henry IV<\/em>, a soldier is ordered by the king never to mention his brother-in-law Mortimer\u2019s name again.  The soldier dreams of buying a starling that will speak the name constantly:  \u201cNay, I\u2019ll have a starling shall be taught to speak; nothing but \u2018Mortimer,\u2019 and give it to him.\u201d  We should note that starlings, which are related to myna birds, are extraordinary mimics, and can even imitate car alarms.

If only Shakespeare had never written that line.  Or if only Eugene Schieffelin had taken up stamp collecting instead of bird-importing. 

April 22 is Earth Day, the largest annual secular observance in the world.  It\u2019s estimated that at least one billion people will be more mindful of environmental issues today.

It may be painful to revisit the accounts of invasive species linked to poor human choices, such as rabbits overrunning Australia, Burmese pythons invading the Everglades, and kudzu spreading all over the American South.  But it\u2019s wise to learn from the past.  From humanity\u2019s beginning in the book of Genesis, our call has been to steward God\u2019s creation.  Part of that stewardship is growing in our understanding of the fragility of Earth\u2019s ecosystems, and learning not to be cavalier about God\u2019s creatures. 

And there\u2019s one other thing.

It would be good to cultivate some love for the European starling.

Those drab-looking black birds, after all, are divine creations.  It wasn\u2019t their choice to take a transatlantic cruise in 1890 and be thrust into an environment where their numbers would explode. 

\u201cYes, but they\u2019re annoying pests.\u201d  Does that mean we should judge living things on the basis of whether they make us<\/u><\/em> feel happy or sad?

Jesus instructs us to \u201clook around you at the birds of the sky; they don\u2019t sow, they don\u2019t harvest, and they don\u2019t even put things aside for safekeeping, and still your heavenly Father feeds them.\u201d (Matthew 6:26)  We may assume those words take starlings into account.  

Birds are among the most active and busy of all God\u2019s creatures.  Yet they never worry<\/em>. 

Perhaps on this Earth Day, as we notice the birds working feverishly to prepare their spring nests, we can let them be our teachers. 

Even those starlings that we haven\u2019t given a second look for a very long time. 
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Eugene Schieffelin meant well.  All he wanted to do was honor his favorite playwright. The German-born immigrant \u2013 and Shakespeare obsessive \u2013 yearned to introduce to America all the birds mentioned in the Bard\u2019s plays.  At great personal expense, he imported hundreds of breeding pairs of non-native species and released them in New York City\u2019s Central Park.  No one was… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":666,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[217,216],"class_list":["post-665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-creation","tag-earth-day"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=665"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":667,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665\/revisions\/667"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}