Look Over There
Starlings: The Curious Odyssey of a Most Hated Bird by Mike Stark (Bison Books, 2025)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
European starlings are non-native to America, but they are seemingly all over. And they are not entirely welcome. Birdwatchers find them boring. Starlings are also the kind of bird that a local animal rescue facility might turn away. And a starling may well need rescuing, because we have been waging a chemical war against them since the 1970s and the US government kills over a million per year, for a variety of reasons. In the great drama of North American birds, starlings have been cast as villains. But every great villain has a backstory. That backstory is the subject of Mike Stark’s new book, Starlings: The Curious Odyssey of a Most Hated Bird.
You may have heard something about the starling’s backstory in America, which is part lore and part history. According to lore, there was a rich guy who imported and released all kinds of songbirds into America, because he wanted all the Shakespearean birds here or he missed European birds or wanted songbirds for his wife, or something like that. That is neither entirely true nor entirely false. Starlings were intentionally imported and released in Central Park, by one well-to-do Eugene Schieffelin, starting in 1889. He released many other birds, too. It probably had nothing to do with Shakespeare. It was the kind of thing that people in acclimatization societies were doing in Europe and in all of what historian Alfred Crosby called “Neo-Europes” in his book Ecological Imperialism.
From its first pages, Starlings takes us on a tour of the past. Stark explains that not only did people not think through things like rabbits in Australia enough in advance, in the nineteenth century people joined acclimatization societies with the goal of enthusiastically bringing birds and animals and plants to new places. France had a Société Zoologique d’Acclimatation and the UK had its equivalent. Eugene Schieffelin was the president of the American Acclimatization Society. The vision was partly romantic, imagining ecosystems enriched by the diversity and beauty of other ecosystems. It was partly hubris, believing that nature might be perfected by human effort. And, even though later generations would find it all absurd, it was not entirely as foolish as it seems. Corn and potatoes and beans traveled from the Americas and improved the diet of the entire planet, as Alfred Crosby explored in The Columbian Exchange. Some exchanges were altogether regrettable, others were not. We would not have American mustangs without the arrival of Spanish horses. American apples all started elsewhere. But no one today seems happy that the starling has thrived here.
More than many of the other birds Schieffelin and various societies released, the starling has succeeded in North America. Starlings outlines the consequences of this colonization and the ongoing relations between humans and starlings. Initially an eastern bird, starlings are now an everywhere bird. They fly and roost in large flocks. Historically, that has made them a menace of many different cities and towns. Farmers hate to see them coming, too. They are notorious for eating crops, though their consumption levels may be a bit exaggerated—they eat many more bugs than berries. In the era of modern flight, they are some of the most likely birds to cause aviation accidents, as they did with deadly consequences in 1960, in the infamous bird strike of Eastern Airlines Flight 375 at Logan Airport in Boston. To top it off, starlings seem proficient at pushing native birds out of their nesting areas.
Once starlings really made themselves welcome, we began to go to war with them. Starlings documents the many ways in which people have tried to get rid of these birds. There are the “bird men” hired by towns to frighten them off, operating just one step above snake oil salesman. There have been acoustic efforts. There have been goos and powders and people employed to keep starlings away from presidential inaugurations. Extreme chemical warfare, which kills thousands of birds at a go, is still in use. Airports police the presence of starlings. There are lasers. The USDA estimates that starlings cost American agriculture about $1 billion per year. We spend less than that, but not an insignificant figure, trying to kill as many of them as we can. Sometimes we settle for chasing them away.
As Mike Stark points out in Starlings, this is kind of a shame. Starlings are, in many ways, special. We have grown familiar with them, but they are beautiful. Unlike many birds their size, they stride rather than hop. They are also very intelligent and can learn to talk. They eat bugs so well that they resolved several historic insect crises in major US cities. And the way that they move in the air—their murmurations—are something to marvel at, for viewers and for scientists. Stark admits to mixed feelings about the birds, but he is not lacking in appreciation for them. Like the 2007 book, Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World’s Most Revered and Reviled Bird by Andrew Blechman, this book can open readers’ eyes to the remarkable ordinary.
Our relationship to starlings also speaks to broader cultural trends. Starlings were initially welcomed and then rejected by Americans. Language used against them in the nineteenth century echoed anti-immigration rhetoric used against people. In 2025, we have all kinds of anxieties about non-native species and concerns for the preservation of indigenous plants and animals. Starlings does not suggest that those concerns are misplaced, but it does ask when a bird might become considered naturalized. Starlings were not here in 1500, but they have now been here for over a hundred years. Should we accept them at some point? This book looks at that topic from the angle of starlings, but poses the question which applies many species.
Starlings is a good read. The chapters are tight and focused and involve many interesting stories and statistics. The accounts of interactions between people and birds and cities’ efforts to rid themselves of the birds are some of the most interesting parts of the book. At times, some of the later chapters seem to resemble earlier chapters, making some passages a little thematically repetitive. We could also learn more about some starling habits. However, this book is focused on human and starling interaction, not simply starlings themselves. These are minor imperfections. On the whole, Starlings is a very engaging read, one which requires no foreknowledge or pre-existing interest in starlings, or birds. It is a strong general audience non-fiction read.
A book like Starlings can help us reflect on the environment around us. Americans have tried to eliminate starlings, more or less, as we have coyotes. In both cases, we have failed. In some ways, nature can be more resilient than we can comprehend or scientifically counter. The United States right now is rewilding in certain respects—forests are increasing in parts of the east coast, deer are on the increase, beavers are returning to some of their old haunts. Yet we know that nature can be very delicate, as well. We have buffalo only through the efforts of individuals in the past. The wolves in Yellowstone may be thriving, but they had to be reintroduced. Starlings persist, but songbirds are in major decline across the country, as are insects. We have 30% fewer songbirds than we did in 1970, and starlings are part of those losses. Starting to think about starlings can mean starting to think about the whole ecosystem.
Starlings may also help us increase our attention on the world around us generally. Many of us see starlings regularly, but never really see them. A book like this, or like Unseen City by Nathanael Johnson (2016), encourages attention. In Unseen City, Johnson directs our attention to pigeons, snails, squirrels, gingko trees, and much more. As the authors of both books realize, not only do we sometimes stop really seeing things, it is very easy for us to fail to appreciate things that we see as common. Starlings is a book that pushes back against that sleepwalking approach to life and which shows us ways in which we can increase our understanding and wonder with the plants and animals we already have around us. We do not have to travel anywhere to see interesting flora and fauna, thanks to nature and men like Eugene Schieffelin, we have all kinds of interesting flora and fauna right here.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023).
