You may have heard that our Wimberley is now a certified Bird City Texas community.
This prestigious recognition, awarded by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department in partnership with Audubon Texas, celebrates our efforts to protect birds, enhance their habitats, and build a sustainable future. Wimberley is now one of only 15 certified Bird Cities in Texas.
This reminds me of another celebrated bird story. The anecdote may well be historical fiction, more fabrication than fact, but it makes a great story. The story has been spread by the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian. Science writers from news outlets such as the Washington Post include it as a showpiece of environmental destruction, while literary scholars use it to theorize about the ecologicalimpact of Shakespeare’s work. In all cases it appears as a cautionary tale.
Here’s how the story goes: The year was 1890 when an eccentric drug manufacturer and Shakespeare fanatic named Eugene Shieffelin entered New York City’s Central Park and released 60 European starlings he had imported from England. A year later, he released 40 more.
Schieffelin’s motives were as romantic as they were ill-fated. He hoped to introduce into North America every bird mentioned by Shakespeare. He wanted to look out his window and see the same kind of birds in the sky that Shakespeare had seen.
Schieffelin belonged to the American Acclimatization Society. The group’s goal was to introduce “such foreign varieties of the animal and vegetable kingdom as may be useful or interesting.” In the 1th century, acclimatization societies were fashionable and supported by the scientific knowledge and beliefs of that era, as the effect that non-native species could have on the local ecosystem was not yet well-known.
We can imagine Schieffelin watching the starlings flutter off into the park and hoping for them to survive and maybe breed. And breed they did. The starling population grew exponentially, spreading across America at an astonishing rate.
Starlings also have a unique jaw-dropping talent. At times they gather in an enormous shape-shifting flock called a murmuration – named after the sound of so many flapping wings of birds in flight.
This spectacular natural phenomenon involves huge groups of starlings, as many as 750,000 birds at a time, flying together in a coordinated fashion, creating swirling patterns in the sky – teardrops, figure eights, columns and waves.
Murmurations constantly change direction, climbing up a few hundred feet, then rocketing down to almost crash into the ground. Their movements are coordinated by the birds observing what others around them are doing.
Why does this happen? Grouping together offers safety in numbers as predators like Peregrine Falcons find it hard to target one bird amongst a hypnotizing flock of thousands – the socalled “selfish herd hypothesis.”
You may have been fortunate enough to witness this. Murmurations typically form about an hour before sunset. After about 45 minutes of this remarkable aerial display, the birds, all at once, drop down into their communal roosting site for the night, gathering to keep warm and possibly to exchange information about good feeding areas.
Today, we don’t even know how many starlings live in the U.S., with estimates ranging from 45 million to 200 million. Most, if not all, of them are descended from Schieffelin’s initial 100 birds. The problem is that as an alien species, the starlings wreak havoc because they were introduced into an ecosystem of which they were not naturally a part.
Starlings consume millions of dollars worth of crops each year and, in their huge numbers, have even caused fatal airplane crashes.
This is the “Law of Unintended Consequences” at work – unforeseen and often troubling effects that were not part of the original intention. Poor Mr. Schieffelin would have had no idea.
To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “Tis better to bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.”
But then again, beneath every starling wingbeat lives a quiet promise: that the earth and sky were never truly apart.
Don Minnick is a clinical psychologist and organizational consultant and the author of books linked to business and the arts. He has found a home in the creative and culture- rich Wimberley valley. He is a Board Member of Wimberley Arts.org
