Eugene Schieffelin, a 19th-century pharmaceutical manufacturer, was an ambitious eccentric fellow. He belonged to the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, as well as the New York Zoological Society. He was also a Shakespeare fanatic. One day, as he was strolling through Central Park, Schieffelin decided to gather every bird referenced in Shakespeare’s plays and introduce them into the United States. There are over sixty, of which the starling is one.
The only reference to the starlings comes from Henry IV, Part I. Hotspur intends to annoy the king with an endlessly chattering bird and says, “I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak/ Nothing but ‘Mortimer,’ and give it him/ To keep his anger still in motion.”
In the spring of 1890, Schieffelin released sixty European starlings he had imported from England. He released another forty the following year. While the skylarks and song thrushes had failed to thrive, the starlings had no issue adapting to the colder climate.
Of course, Schieffelin had no inkling of the massively destructive force he had released. With an estimated 200 million European starlings in North America today, things aren’t going so well. Famous for bullying several native species and evicting them from their nests, starlings have been linked to numerous diseases, including a fungal lung ailment that affects agricultural workers. The birds are very adaptable; they’ll eat anything, and roost anywhere. They often roost in hordes of up to a million and will devour vast stores of seed and fruit. In a single day, a cloud of starlings can consume up to twenty tons of potatoes. It has been calculated that these little birds now cause a billion dollars of crop damage a year.
In October 1960, Eastern Air Lines Flight 375 had a deadly encounter with the ‘rats of the sky’. After a large number of the birds were sucked into two of the propeller engines, the flight crew shut the engines down and this caused the plane to slow and dip left. The wing dropped, the nose angled up, the plane spun, and it crashed almost vertically into Boston Harbour. Only ten of the seventy-two onboard survived.
The relocation of organisms is not a recent phenomenon; species migrations have been affecting ecosystems since life began on earth. The real problem is with us. Human activities, such as global commerce and the pet trade, are the most common ways invasive plants, animals, microbes, and other organisms are transported to new habitats. Many of these species have been introduced into regions as a form of biological pest control. Sometimes these non-native species do a good job of handling the initial pest problem; sometimes they do such a good job that they become an enormous pest problem themselves.
The cane toad is often cited as the perfect example of an introduced species gone horribly wrong. Native to South and Central America, it was brought to regions of Hawaii, the Caribbean, and the Philippines to fight pests in sugarcane fields. The plan yielded some impressive results and was quickly implemented in various other regions worldwide.
Unfortunately, cane toads have a nasty habit of not just eating crop pests and insects, but also any animal that they can fit their enormous largemouths around. They have a voracious appetite and breed quickly. They also secrete toxins capable of killing just about any animal they come in contact with and therefore pose a risk to native fauna as well as cats and dogs.
Few of us today would readily tamper with continental-sized ecosystems as Schieffelin did all those years ago, or introduce massive toads to sugarcane fields. But we are not entirely innocent of meddling with the natural world. Debate continues to rage on regarding animal culling, but few topics polarize public opinion than that of indoor versus outdoor cats. While many Canadian and American families tend to favour the idea of locking up their feline companions, ninety percent of cats in the United Kingdom are free to roam the outside world unsupervised. The Brits are happy to allow cats to be cats without much issue. By giving them free access to the outdoors, cats are able to express their natural behaviour. They can climb, claw, pounce, swipe, and anything else when the mood takes them. In short, they exercise both their mind and body as nature intended.
By allowing cats to mimic hunting behaviour, they follow scents, patrol their property, sunbathe, chew grass, sharpen their claws, climb a tree, chase butterflies, and make friends. They entertain themselves by doing cat-like things. And yet, ever so often, some ‘concerned citizen’ picks up a healthy happy cat and takes it to the town hall. This does nothing but causes emotional distress for the animal and its owner. Perhaps concerned citizens should concern themselves with other things (like themselves). Mahatma Gandhi once wrote, “The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way animals are treated.” He may have been referring to starlings or cane toads, though I doubt it. It’s more likely that he was referring to the simple act of sitting in the sunshine with a neighbourhood cat – and then leaving it to its own devices.
