Just over a hundred and fifty years before the first starlings appeared in Central Park, the Swedish botanist and zoologist Carl Linnaeus had placed the species within his emerging avian taxonomy and christened it with the Latinized name we still use: Sturnus vulgaris. Sturnus for “star,” referring to the shape of the bird in flight, with its pointed wings, bill, and tail; and vulgaris, not for “vulgar,” as starling detractors like to assume, but for “common.”* When Linnaeus named the bird, it was simply part of the European landscape and had not spread across the waters. There was no
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“Just over a hundred and fifty years before the first starlings appeared in Central Park, the Swedish botanist and zoologist Carl Linnaeus had placed the species within his emerging avian taxonomy and christened it with the Latinized name we still use: Sturnus vulgaris. Sturnus for “star,” referring to the shape of the bird in flight, with its pointed wings, bill, and tail; and vulgaris, not for “vulgar,” as starling detractors like to assume, but for “common.”* When Linnaeus named the bird, it was simply part of the European landscape and had not spread across the waters. There was no controversy surrounding the species; it was just a pretty bird. 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.”
