Schieffelin's Starlings

     Hotspur: I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak

     Nothing but 'Mortimer,' and give it him,

     To keep his anger still in motion.”
                                 —Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I.

When I was a child in the late 1950s, 

I remember vast murmurations of starlings
wheeling overhead heralded winter's bent claw.

From afar, they were like bevies of Victorian ladies 

rushing in taffeta gowns, accented by the thievery
of weak floorboards. Add the cicada's drone,
the breathy tide and warbling streams.

When a dark curtain of starlings drew nigh 

their flight was a cacophony of screech & din,

each bird following the bird in front

like wild winter geese all in a vee—

only with no one bird in the lead. 

With synchronized precision they'd weave 

and bank like shoals of skybound herring, 

or pond cells pulsing in a petri dish. 

At dusk, gyrating flocks of starlings
would blanket the trees down by the creek.
With many false starts, they'd alight
and take flight in tight aerial formations

like apparitions of dervishing angels

before bedding down for the night to roost. 

It's about group mind, pecking order
and safety in numbers. Who's gonna land
(or be eaten) first? Not me. Not me. 
Not meeeeeee. And so on.

Darkfall usually settled the squabble.

A murmuration of starlings. Wikipedia Commons.

One mad March morning in 1890, 

Eugene Schieffelin, an eccentric Bronx pharmacist 

feloniously in love with Shakespeare's works, 

let loose in Central Park some 60 starlings.

Schieffelin, a seventh son, avid Shakespeare buff, 

and chairman of the American Acclimatization Society,

introduced 600 species of the Avon Bard's birds
to the New World. Most of his lunatic schemes
never bore fruit, but 16 of his Adam & Evil couples
survived harsh winter. Schieffelin introduced a plague
of feathered locusts upon the continent. 

Not only starlings but also house sparrows.

But poetic justice is also served: an artist is teaching 

loquacious starlings, aka poor-man's-myna bird,

to utter the name of their liberator, Schieffelin, 

so their learned behavior will spread across the land—
like Nazi infiltrators trying to say Scheveningen.

Adult starling Sternus vulgaris. Wikipedia commons.

I remember one starling plummeted from the sky

and landed with an abrupt thump at my feet. 

I was transfixed by all that dead beauty 

still warm, but silent as the grave in my hand.
Its feathers—an aurora of indigo, teal and twilight 

spangled with iridescent shooting stars. 

I didn't want to bury that bird. It was far too lovely. 

But I knew that death belonged to the ground, 

not to the sky, or buried in my treasure box.

I'll posthumously name that dead starling 

Hotspur for his bloodred feet 

or Schieffelin for his gift of gab. 

Perhaps Post-Mortimer would be 

a more appropriate moniker.

S. v. faroensis on the Faroe Islands. Wikipedia Commons.

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