How Did Starlings Get to America? The Shakespeare Myth

The Central Park releases

In the late 19th century, “acclimatization societies” in Europe, Australia and North America tried to introduce plants and animals from other parts of the world. Their members wanted familiar birds from home and believed some species would control insect pests on farms. The risks of invasive species were not yet understood.

Eugene Schieffelin, a wealthy New Yorker and amateur ornithologist, was chairman of the American Acclimatization Society. In March 1890 he released about 60 European starlings brought from England in Central Park, and in the spring of 1891 he released about 40 more. Within a few years, starlings were seen nesting in the park, including under the eaves of the American Museum of Natural History on its western edge.

Schieffelin was also involved in releasing other European birds, including skylarks, nightingales, bullfinches and chaffinches. All of those attempts failed. He had earlier supported the introduction of the house sparrow, another European species that became widespread, a story told in how did house sparrows get to America?.

Earlier attempts that failed

Central Park was not the first place starlings were released. Records mention introductions in Cincinnati, Quebec and New York in the 1870s, and in 1889 the Portland Song Bird Club released 35 pairs in Portland, Oregon. These early populations died out within a few years. Only the 1890–1891 New York releases led to a lasting population.

How starlings spread across the continent

For about a decade the starlings stayed around New York City. Then they began to spread quickly. Their range moved west and south year after year, and within about half a century of the Central Park releases they had crossed the continent to the Pacific coast. Today European starlings breed from southern Alaska and Canada to northern Mexico, and they have spread naturally to Cuba and the Bahamas.

Several traits helped them succeed:

• They eat almost anything, from soil insects and earthworms to fruit, grain, livestock feed and food waste.
• They nest in holes in buildings as well as in trees, so towns and farms suit them perfectly.
• They are bold and aggressive in claiming nest holes, often evicting native birds.
• They thrive on short grass, and the spread of lawns, pastures and farmland across North America created ideal feeding habitat.
• Many raise two broods a year and form large winter flocks that help them survive.

By the late 20th century, starlings had become one of the most numerous birds in North America. Estimates vary widely, but the population is in the tens of millions, with some estimates as high as about 150 million birds. Breeding Bird Survey data show numbers have fallen since the 1960s, though the species is still extremely common.

The Shakespeare myth

You will often read that Schieffelin wanted to introduce every bird mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare, and that the starling was chosen because of a single line in Henry IV, Part 1, where Hotspur imagines teaching a starling to say the name “Mortimer”.

There is no good evidence for this. The Shakespeare story first appeared in print in 1948, in an essay by the American naturalist Edwin Way Teale, more than 40 years after Schieffelin’s death in 1906. Teale’s own notes suggest he was speculating. A 2021 study by literary scholars Lauren Fugate and John MacNeill Miller traced the story and found no record from Schieffelin’s lifetime linking him or the Acclimatization Society to such a plan.

The myth may have spread because it makes a neat story: one eccentric Shakespeare fan unleashing a plague of birds. In reality, Schieffelin was one of several people releasing starlings, and his motives were typical of acclimatization societies at the time, a mix of nostalgia for European birds and hope of pest control.

The impact of starlings in America

European starlings are now considered one of the most harmful invasive birds in North America, and the species is on the IUCN’s list of 100 of the world’s worst invasive alien species.

• Competition with native birds. Starlings take over tree holes and nest boxes needed by eastern bluebirds, purple martins, tree swallows, woodpeckers and northern flickers.
• Damage to agriculture. Large flocks eat fruit such as cherries and grapes, newly sown grain and cattle feed. Estimates of crop losses in the United States run to hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
• Problems with roosts. Huge winter roosts in towns cause noise and mess, and flocks near airports pose a bird-strike risk to aircraft.

Starlings also eat large numbers of insect pests, including crop-damaging grubs, and their winter flocks and murmurations can be spectacular. Because they are not native, they are not protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.