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Starlings are now one of the most pervasive birds in North America, and there are so many that no one can count them; estimates run to about two hundred million. Ecologically, their presence here lies on a scale somewhere between highly unfortunate and utterly disastrous.
In The Birdist’s Rules of Birding, a National Audubon Society blog by environmental journalist Nicholas Lund, one of the primary rules is actually “It’s Okay to Hate Starlings.”
“If you Google ‘America’s most hated bird,’ all of the top results refer to starlings.
Starlings are rats with wings.”
Inspire is from the Latin meaning “to be breathed upon; to be breathed into.”
there is one thing we know for certain: Mozart loved his starling.
But the fact that Mozart lived with, and loved, a starling is extraordinary. One of the world’s greatest composers chose, as a household companion, what is now one of the world’s most hated birds.
The poem shows that Mozart had become thoroughly acquainted with the typical starling personality—bright, personable, charming, mischievous.
(As naturalist George Laycock put it, “Starlings do nothing in moderation.”)
Recent studies on the presence of trees show us two beautiful and related facts: that even a few trees in urban neighborhoods will increase the diversity of bird species, and that people who live near trees are healthier—both mentally and physically—than those who don’t.
We decide, moment to moment, if we will allow ourselves to be affected by the presence of this brighter world in our everyday lives.
Pliny declared that a magpie who has trouble learning a word will suffer such angst over his failure that he will die of it!
This is what starlings do—they join the music.
I will never underestimate the possibilities —for starlings, or for any of the beautiful, bewildering voices in our more-than-human world.*
“We lie in the lap of immense intelligence,” wrote Emerson, “which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity.”
Welsh poet John O’Donohue believed that “music is, perhaps, the art form that brings us closest to the eternal because it changes immediately and irreversibly the way we experience time.”
Poet Gary Snyder wrote that wildness is “a quality of one’s own consciousness,”
When I set out to follow the story of Mozart and his starling, I saw at its center a shining, irresistible paradox: one of the greatest and most loved composers in all of history was inspired by a common, despised starling.
in this shared earthly living, when we give our attention to it, we find the basis of our compassion, and of our empathy for other creatures.
Death, if we think about it soberly, is the true and ultimate purpose of our life.
Against this cosmic background the life span of a particular plant or animal appears not as a drama complete in itself, but only as a brief interlude in a panorama of endless change.”
There are exaltations of larks and murders of crows. A flock of flying starlings is called, beautifully, a murmuration, but there is no official name for a terrestrial flock, as far as I know. Plague seems appropriate.
