A Loud and Relentless Species

Starlings: The Curious Odyssey of a Most Hated Bird, by Mike Stark

Bison Books, 2025

272 pages, paperback

ABA Sales–Buteo Books 15517

When I was a child, my family somehow came into possession of a book called Arnie the Darling Starling by Margarete Sigl Corbo. I don’t remember much of the story, but the title lives in infamy. To this day you only have to say “Arnie” to my mother, and she’ll laugh and drawl the word “darling!” in a mocking tone. My siblings do the same. We all know that Sturnus vulgaris—loud, messy, fecund, gregarious, aggressive, just plain relentless—is a pest, not a pet.

Mike Stark understands this perspective and centers it throughout most of his new book. The subtle clue is in the subtitle. Starlings: The Curious Odyssey of a Most Hated Bird tells a story that is familiar in its outlines to most American birders but adds a lot of detail. Stark starts by disposing of the myth that blames Shakespeare for the starling’s introduction at Central Park and puts the event into the context of that era’s passion for moving species around, together with the belated awareness that such efforts could have notable downsides. Then he moves on to a multi-chapter account of different strategies adopted to try to control European Starlings as they spread from Manhattan across the U.S. These range from traveling Bird Men reminiscent of patent-medicine peddlers to artillery and firehoses all the way to entire laboratories dedicated to finding the best soaps to wash away the protective oil on iridescent black feathers.

All these efforts are doomed to fail, of course. As a result, the book can sometimes make the reader feel trapped in a loop: Starlings appear in a new location, humans react, the best human efforts only result in the temporary displacement of the starlings. Occasional quotes from humans who are fonder of starlings are swamped by repeated accounts of noise and bird droppings, economic destruction, and the first downed commercial plane ever attributed to a bird strike. The case for co-existence is more one of necessity than desirability. We simply can’t get rid of starlings.

There are hints of another narrative underneath this one, though, and it’s intriguing. Stark kicks off the ninth chapter with a broader perspective on the ecological destruction wrought by European colonialism in North America and, in a book about birds, this means talking about the Passenger Pigeon. Here Stark does something extremely interesting, albeit understated. The descriptions he gives, and the quotes he chooses to highlight, describe the Passenger Pigeon in terms eerily reminiscent of the charges against the starling. Their flocks undulate across the sky, their sounds drown out human speech, and when they roost, they sometimes destroy the trees they’ve alighted on. They are overwhelming. They are uncontrollable, except by violence. Later, describing the application of mass quantities of surfactants to nuisance roosts in southeastern U.S., Stark demonstrates this blurred boundary again; starlings are the species named and shamed, but in the final tally of the dead they are less than a third of the total—the bulk of the casualties are indigenous species like Red-winged Blackbirds and Common Grackles. The sin is not being nonindigenous. It’s annoying humans, costing them money, or even offending their aesthetic sensibilities. When starlings don’t do that—when they whistle Mozart tunes or murmur through the sky instead of fouling buildings or descending on cattle feeding operations—they are spared, for a moment, and maybe even loved.

Despite this, Starlings is not really a revisionist history, let alone a defense of the titular species. It will not convince you that starlings are darling. It will just convince you—if you didn’t already know—that humans are the louder, messier, and more relentless species by far.

Carrie-Edmund Laben (carrielaben.com) is the Shirley Jackson Award–winning author of the novel A Hawk in the Woods. Their widely published work has been supported by the MacDowell residency program, the Anne LaBastille Memorial Writers Residency, and the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts. They hold an MFA from the University of Montana and live in Queens, New York.