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Escargot, Anyone? One warm Sunday in May, I found myself standing on the balcony of my office overlooking the Saint Louis Zoo, watching the birds flock at the feeder below. A small house sparrow was under attack by a starling, which pecked viciously at the little bird. The sparrow would escape briefly, flutter a few feet, and the starling would once again renew the onslaught. A small ring of sparrows gathered around their tormented fellow, but they were obviously incapable of stopping the larger bird. A flock of pigeons, oblivious to the commotion, continued to feed only a few feet away from what appeared to be a death struggle. I was tempted to go run down the steps and stop the starling, but then I thought otherwise. First, it occurred to me that this was a part of nature. I had no right to interfere in the lives of those birds. Then it occurred to me that I probably did have a right to interfere. It was my feeder, after all, since I was ultimately responsible for having it there and keeping it full. But, before I could move, I had a third thought. Not a single one of those birds were supposed to be there in the first place. All three species—house sparrows, starlings, and pigeons—are interlopers. They were not present in North America until humans brought them here and released them. Many would argue that, in a perfect world, the North American populations would all be exterminated. In fact, that is the core of one of the fundamental debates in conservation. The question is, should we attempt to undo the damage caused by man and restore habitats to the forms they took before humans dramatically altered 10 1 Escargot, Anyone? 11 them, or are changes like the introduction of totally new species just part of the normal course of things, whether that introduction is at the hand of man or the hand of nature? By the time I was on to the third thought, the little sparrow regrouped, mustered its strength, and flew to a high tree some fifty yards away. The starling remained in hot pursuit. I never saw if the starling continued the attack or gave up, but by that time, I was too busy mulling over the larger questions of environmental ethics to worry about the outcome of the struggle. I was also a little relieved to have the whole issue taken out of my hands. House sparrows, pigeons, and starlings were all deliberately introduced into North America, each for a very different reason. Of the three, the story of the introduction of the starling is probably the most bizarre. On March 6, 1890, a man named Eugene Schieffelin walked out to Central Park in New York City with eighty European starlings in small wooden crates and, quite deliberately , changed the ecology of North America. Schieffelin, as it happens, was a huge fan of William Shakespeare. His life’s dream was that all of the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s work might someday come to inhabit his city. No one knows exactly why he thought this would be of benefit to the populace at large. Perhaps he thought that the city would be a better place if Shakespeare’s larks and nightingales were heard singing in the early evening as New Yorkers strolled through their beautiful park. Maybe the starlings were just an afterthought. After all, they’re only mentioned in one place in all of Shakespeare’s works—Henry IV, Part I. He may have included them out of a sense of completeness, while he thought mostly of introducing birds with sweeter songs. We’ll never know, but we do know that a single flock of starlings (called a murmuration) can grow up to a million or more birds. They can blanket the sky and, when they descend on a farmer’s crop, they are ruinous. They plague our cities, covering the ground beneath their roosts thick with excrement. They torment our native birds, robbing nests and killing the young. From the original eighty birds he released in 1890, along with another forty he added in April 1891, Schieffelin is responsible for the presence of the two hundred million starlings found in North America today. Most people, if they thought about it at all, would wish that there weren’t any. Pigeons have been in North America much longer than starlings. In 1604 the great French navigator Champlain piloted...

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