Friday, November 30, 2012

Teaching a Starling to Talk

While the passenger pigeon was well on the way to extinction, the starling, a British native, was introduced into New York’s Central Park by the American Acclimatization Society, a group that hoped to introduce into the U.S. every species of bird mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays. Eugene Schiefflen, a founding member of the Society, released 100 birds in the park in 1890 and 1891. By 1950, there were fifty million of the birds in the U.S., greatly annoying people from coast to coast who resented the starlings’ appetites (they like fruit), their tendency to collide with airplanes, and potential to carry disease that infect livestock.

Starlings are great mimics, a not always charming habit that inspired one BD Collier to post instructions online on how to teach a starling to say “Shiefflen.” Since the birds frequently mimic each other, the thinking was it would take just a few trained birds that, once released, might telegraph it to the many untutored starlings. “By following any or all of the strategies outlined on this website,” wrote Collier, “you can help change the starling from an unwanted invader to a productive environmental teaching tool.” Passenger pigeons were not mimics. They simply cooed, a call that is comforting when we hear it from a single bird but would become a thunderous sound in a flock of 5 million. If we could have taught Martha, the last passenger pigeon, to talk perhaps we would have trained her to say “Forever.”

There are just over 900 native bird species in North America. They are the wild vertebrate we are most likely to see in nearly every region of the U.S. , and if we do notice a bird it’s probably a starling or English sparrow, both immigrants, or perhaps a pigeon (not a passenger), all species reviled by bird lovers. Birders are list makers. They measure their passion for birds like an accountant would: how many have I seen, when, what birds do I hope to see before I die? Bird lovers carry hope with them along with their binoculars. It is a particularly fierce kind of hope. Thirty years after the last passenger pigeon died, some citizens still insisted that the great flocks survived somewhere down in Mexico. There were also lingering reports of a few wild pigeons here and there in the Midwest by people who were “well acquainted with the difference between a mourning dove and a passenger pigeon.” This is the same hope that inspired reports a few years ago of Ivory-billed Woodpecker sightings in a remote Arkansas swamp, a bird that was declared extinct in the 1940s.

 Most of the rest of us, the non-birders, are at least vaguely aware of birds. If nothing else, we envy flight, especially when we’re stuck in highway gridlock or hiking up a long trail that pivots back and forth up a mountainside. If only we could fly to the top. If only we could drift home aloft from there, “as the crow flies.” Even at the edge of awareness, birds still fly across our field of vision: A magpie’s explosion of wings when our car comes impossibly close to the bird on a highway, feeding on a dead cat; the muttering of geese in geometric agreement against a gray November sky; gulls circling greedily at the town dump. Birds come and go, flying in and out of our vision, in and out of our minds, defying the very thing that makes our bodies bend and ache in old age—gravity.