One of the four readers of this blog indicated to me once that at least I provided sources in most of my posts. He was implying, I think, that they were the readable bits and that from them one might learn something and be able to actually figure out what I was rambling on about. Given the importance of sources to him and my extensive use of them, I will provide here, additional sources to correct a factoid I presented a while back. A 'factoid', you will recall, is "an assumption or speculation that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact."
The oft-repeated assertion which was repeated by me was put this way: "One gentleman, Eugene Schieffelin, was responsible for importing starlings and other birds which appeared in the works of Shakespeare, but were missing in America." The Schieffelin/Shakespeare connection is well known among birding folklorists, but it is a factoid rather than a fact. Schieffelin did, in fact, release starlings in New York City in 1890, but not likely because he was a fan of the Bard. He was a chairman of the American Acclimization Society and the members of such a group deliberately imported various species to the United States, for a variety of reasons unrelated to Shakespeare. Sparrows also were brought to North America and a "sparrow war" resulted.
The origin of the Schieffelin/Shakespeare connection has been traced back to Edwin Way Teale and I will, of course, provide the source. Although I admit to being a Teale fan, I think it is correct to say that his connection of Shakespeare to Schieffelin is a rather innocent one. There was (and still is) a Shakespeare Garden in Central Park which contained plants mentioned in his plays and Teale seems to think that Schieffelin had a similar motivation. There were many readers of Teale's books and essays, but the connection between Shakespeare and the starlings was make known to more people when an essay was published in 1947 in Sports Illustrated - "A Plague of Starlings," by Robert Cantwell.
That a lover of the literature of Shakespeare sought to populate the United States with the birds mentioned by the Bard provides an interesting anecdote. “If true, it would suggest that a long-dead dramatist totally reshaped the ecosystem of a foreign continent, which is a fascinating connection between literature and science,” One could argue, for example, that the crash of a Lockheed L-188 Electra taking off in Boston in 1960 was caused by the large number of starlings hitting the plane's propellers and, indirectly, because of Shakespeare.
Perhaps the anecdote can now be put to rest. The arguments about starlings and sparrows and "invasive species" and the consequences of their introduction continue and you can learn more about them below.
Sources:
This starling story was prompted by this article: "The Shakespearean Tall Tale That Shaped How We See Starlings: Researchers Debunked a Long-repeated Yarn That the Common Birds Owe Their North American Beginnings to a 19th-century Lover of the Bard. Maybe This Ubiquitous Bird’s Story is Ready for a Reboot." Jason Bittel, New York Times, April 11, 2022.
If you cannot read the article in the NYT, the one by the researchers is accessible and readable even by non-academics. An abstract is provided. John MacNeill Miller with Lauren Fugate “Shakespeare’s Starlings: Literary History and the Fictions of Invasiveness.” Environmental Humanities Vol. 13, No. 2, 2021, pp. 301-322.
"Scientists, environmentalists, and nature writers often report that all common starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) in North America descend from a flock released in New York City in 1890 by Eugene Schieffelin, a man obsessed with importing all the birds mentioned by Shakespeare. This article uses the methods of literary history to investigate this popular anecdote. Today starlings are much despised as an invasive species that displaces native birds and does almost a billion dollars worth of damage to agriculture annually. Because of the starling’s pest status, the Schieffelin story is considered a cautionary tale about the dangers of ecological ignorance. Diving into the history of the Schieffelin story reveals, however, that it is almost entirely fictional. Tracing how its elements emerged and changed over a century of retelling clarifies how the story came to shore up uncertainties in the bird’s environmental history and to distract from the lack of data supporting the starling’s supposedly disastrous impacts. In explaining how a fiction repeated over time attained the status of fact in debates about invasive species, this literary history suggests humanistic methods can serve as useful tools for understanding the value-laden narratives underpinning environmental attitudes and practices today."
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