In Tinkering with Eden, Kim Todd suggests that he ought to have read his revered Shakespeare more closely. In Henry IV, “the starling was not a gift to inspire romance or lyric poetry. It was a bird to prod anger, to pick at a scab, to serve as a reminder of trouble. It was a curse.” Perhaps even Schieffelin would realize that no matter how pretty the starlings were, how mesmerizing their vast autumn cloud-flocks, here was an experiment that had gone terribly wrong.
