Science Myths · Biology

The Starlings America Blamed on Shakespeare — and the One Sentence That Invented the Story

Somebody has left a threat on a dead man's grave page. On the online memorial for Eugene Schieffelin — a New York pharmaceutical heir who died in 1906 — the space reserved for flowers holds this instead: "Some day Im going to put suet feeders all around your mausoleum." The plan is to lure starlings to the tomb of the man who supposedly loosed them on America, and let them ruin his marble the way they ruin everyone's car. It is a very specific grudge against a stranger dead for a century — and it rests on a story somebody appears to have made up in 1948.

· 5 min read · Filed under Biology

The Starlings America Blamed on Shakespeare — and the One Sentence That Invented the Story

What happened?

Here is the version almost everyone has heard. On March 6, 1890, Eugene Schieffelin released a crate of English starlings into Central Park — sixty of them, with forty more the following spring — because he was besotted with Shakespeare and had resolved to bring America every bird the playwright ever mentioned. The birds thrived. Today their descendants number in the tens of millions, bully native songbirds out of nest holes, and cost American farmers hundreds of millions a year. One man, one hobby, one continent-sized mistake.

Almost none of that survives contact with the archive. In 2021, Lauren Fugate and John MacNeill Miller of Allegheny College published a paper in Environmental Humanities tracing the story back to its origins. Schieffelin was real and the release was real; nearly everything interesting about it was added later by other people.

He was not a lone eccentric. He chaired the American Acclimatization Society, one of dozens of nineteenth-century clubs devoted to “acclimatization” — the fashionable project of moving plants and animals between continents to see what would take. Releasing foreign birds wasn’t his weird private hobby; it was a hobby with a membership roll and a lecture series. And he was late to it. The Acclimation Society of Cincinnati let loose roughly four thousand European birds, starlings among them, between 1872 and 1874. Twenty pairs went out in Portland, Oregon in 1889. Schieffelin’s own society had already freed starlings in Central Park in July 1877 — thirteen years before his famous crate.

The claim that every American starling descends from the 1890 flock rests on a technicality: the first observed successful nest came after it — and that nest sat under the eaves of the American Museum of Natural History, directly above a building full of professional bird-watchers. Scattered reports of wild starlings predate it, including four caught from a flock on a Massachusetts estate in November 1876.

So where did Shakespeare come from? A young museum assistant named Frank Chapman — later a celebrated ornithologist — knew Schieffelin as the elderly gentleman who kept dropping by to ask whether anyone had spotted his starlings. Chapman credited him in an 1895 handbook, then in a 1925 essay turned him into a character: a well-meaning amateur who “blazed a false trail.” In a 1948 essay collection, the nature writer Edwin Way Teale added one new sentence: “His curious hobby was the introduction into America of all the birds mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare.”

That is the whole source. Forty-two years after Schieffelin’s death, with no citation, and no mention of Shakespeare in the three folders of research notes Teale left behind. His first typed draft does contain a guess — that Central Park’s Shakespeare Garden may have inspired the man — but that garden wasn’t started until 1913, seven years after Schieffelin died. Teale cut the guess and kept the claim. In 1974 a Sports Illustrated writer named Robert Cantwell inflated it into a villain origin story, and museums, newspapers, and very good science books have repeated it ever since.

Why was it strange?

The strangeness isn’t that a rumor spread. It’s that this one hardened into a citation — turning up in materials from the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History, in prizewinning nature writing, in classrooms, always as the hard-nosed counterexample to sentimental amateurism. A parable about the dangers of not checking your facts, which nobody checked.

Schieffelin’s own 1906 obituary in The New York Times doesn’t mention starlings at all. The one act he is now cursed for wasn’t worth printing while anyone who knew him was alive.

What did scientists learn?

The awkward part is that the science arrived early and got ignored. In 1915, facing complaints about the birds, the USDA launched a study led by E. R. Kalmbach and I. N. Gabrielson, who surveyed farmers and dissected thousands of starling stomachs. Their 1921 verdict: the starling ate more agricultural pests and fewer crops than the native birds it flocked with, and most complaints traced to misidentification. The starling, they wrote, “has been accused of deeds perpetrated largely by the species with which it associates.”

Later numbers held up no better. The famous $800 million in annual crop damage traces back through a chain of citations to a single 1980 British study that blamed poor harvesting practice. Decades of breeding-survey data indicate starlings “have yet to unambiguously and significantly threaten any species of North American cavity nesting bird.” Genetic work at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology found low diversity in American starlings — normal for any introduced population — but no clear signature of the single-flock bottleneck the legend requires.

None of which makes the starling harmless. They are genuine, expensive pests at cattle feedlots, where they eat feed pellets by the ton. And on October 4, 1960, a flock pulled into three engines brought down Eastern Air Lines Flight 375 seconds after takeoff from Boston, killing 62 people — still the deadliest bird strike in US aviation history. The point is narrower than “starlings are fine.” It’s that a memorable story did the work evidence was supposed to do.

How does it affect us today?

Stories set policy. The Schieffelin legend has served for decades as the anchoring example against introduced species, and it helped underwrite federal bird-control programs — including the poison DRC-1339, marketed as Starlicide and developed by the USDA with a maker of the very feed pellets starlings were stealing. In 2009 alone that program killed an estimated four million blackbirds and starlings.

Meanwhile the unstoppable invader is quietly collapsing. Breeding surveys show the North American starling population has fallen by roughly half since the 1960s — among the steepest losses in the 2019 tally of three billion birds gone since 1970. The bird we tell a cautionary tale about is vanishing while we tell it.

The lesson may not be about ecology at all. It’s about how a claim with no source, repeated by people we trust, becomes something everyone knows.

Fun fact

Shakespeare mentions a starling exactly once in everything he wrote. In Henry IV, Part 1, Hotspur — forbidden to speak his brother-in-law’s name — fumes: “I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak / Nothing but ‘Mortimer,’ and give it him / To keep his anger still in motion.” The bird that supposedly conquered a continent in Shakespeare’s honor appears in his work as a scheme to annoy a king.

Sources

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