Content warning: this entry contains references to killing birds. If it helps, nobody manages it very effectively.

It was the spring of the year 1900, and a strange new bird had been spotted flitting around the streets of Rochester. The unfamiliar avian was black and shiny, whistling a merry tune, and perching atop streetcar wires. It was cautiously identified by those in the crowd as possibly being a relative newcomer to the United States, the European starling, a colony of which had been established only ten years before in New York City’s Central Park.

Prior to this, the only starling in Rochester was Starling Street between Emerson and Lexington. Starling Street had only been named as such the year before, presumably to match neighboring avian-themed streets such as Lark, Dove, and Oriole Streets. Until 1899, Starling Street had been 9th Street.

Nobody present for the sighting of this bird recognized it for what it was: a harbinger of a larger invasion.

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The Highland Flock

After that one anomalous starling sighting at the turn of the century, all was quiet on the starling front for about eighteen years, save a smattering of odd sightings. Almost always individual birds, rarely more than four or five in a year. Then, on January 2nd of 1918–28 years after their introduction into the United States–a flock of English starlings arrived in Rochester, taking refuge in the trees of Highland Park.

This flock also seemed somewhat of an outlier; several years would pass without sighting more than a handful of starlings in Highland Park.

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The Starling Invasion

Flash forward to 1928.

Suddenly, by the thousands they came; flocking, screeching, filling the skies of Rochester with undulating blackness. The scourge of starlings that had processed across the state had at last made our city their new home. In their great multitudes they roosted about the edifices of downtown as if they were granite cliffs, and shit prodigiously upon the populace below. Piles of their filth, feathery detritus, and gathering corpses cluttered sidewalks below the birds’ preferred cornices, much to the dismay of businesses and city officials.

The question of the day was, what to do? Experts on all sides disagreed fervently with one another whether the starling was a pestilent blight promising disaster, or a chill bird that ate bad bugs; should they be eradicated on the spot, or simply left to their own devices?

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The Union Trust Scare-crow

One solution was the simple and familiar scare-crow, plucked from his usual stand in the cornfields and placed high upon the 8-story Union Trust Building on Main Street, where the solemn clanking of its payload of dangling tin cans would frighten off the starlings. I suppose that would make it a scare-starling but that doesn’t have the ring of the original.

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Brighton Bird Hunt

In the town of Brighton, there was some small-town countryside flavor to starling elimination: a competition to hunt the birds and then bake a winning pot-pie from their meat. While Rochesterians could not discharge weapons in city limits, Brighton had no such law and took merrily to the shotgun.

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A License to Kill

In 1945, a bill went through the New York State Senate allowing for the wholesale destruction of starlings, a so-called “shoot-on-sight” bill. Though poisoning was not allowed, any other means of murdering the birds was above board, without need to apply for a hunting license.

As the starling-killing bill continued through its democratic process, passing from State Senate to State Assembly, readers of the Democrat & Chronicle weighed in with regards to the bill:

It took me two reads of the above before I realized Mr. John Adams was NOT feeding sparrows TO the ducks all winter. That was a grisly image I was happy to dispel.

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Burlington Avenue Bombardiers

For some reason, Burlington Avenue was the troubled epicenter of the starling situation, and as such the extermination efforts were mostly focused on that street and its surrounds. These efforts were led by city chemist John Temmerman.

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Tactical Scramble

With the lack of success of Temmerman’s assaults, many residents driven to distraction by the birds attempted to come up with their own solutions, with various levels of effectiveness and cruelty.

I’m fairly certain this bit of poisoned rib advice was illegal even at the time, and definitely condemned by local wildlife enthusiasts:

The originator of the poison idea responded defensively to the accusations leveled against her:

The worsening situation led to this tongue-in-cheek article heading below, in response to the University of Rochester receiving an anti-aircraft gun for its Naval Reserve Officer’s Training Corps. One can imagine that beleaguered Burlington Avenue residents would actually welcome a barrage of flak at this point.

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Starling Skeet-Shooting

One of the key points of failure of the starling extermination bill was Rochester’s extant prohibition against discharging firearms within city limits, which restricted tactics to fireworks and other fear-inducing tactics to scare off the birds. However, a special permit was drawn up by the state Conservation Department, giving City Manager Louis B. Cartwright and city police “permission to take starlings by any means except use of poison within the City of Rochester.” This led to a most American solution being tried: cops shooting guns at the problem.

Though the results seemed promising, they were far from permanent. The starlings would continue to return, if not the very next day, then very definitely the next year.

Not ones to pass up a good time, the police would continue shooting starlings annually, despite the lack of long-term results.

Chief of Police Henry T. Copenhagen, mentioned in the above article, had previously headed up the city’s all-out war on claw machines and parlor games in the 1930s; here he was now firing guns at birds.

Much like police of today, the fuzz of the forties and fifties were shocked to find a problem can’t be solved by gunfire. Despite the huge amounts of slaughter, they didn’t make a dent. Bizarrely, massive flocks of short-lived and frantic birds seemed to take little notice of hundreds of their cohort meeting grisly ends, and kept coming back.

Incredibly, the annual onslaught against the starlings went on for a couple decades afterwards. In fact, I was unable to ascertain when the police actually stopped blasting at the birds. The most recent report on police slaying starlings was from 1962.

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Operation: Birdbath

In an odd turn of events, the fire department got in on the police department’s fun by spraying their hoses at starlings. Yeah. Really.

Firemen blasted a maple tree in front of No. 203 Elmdorf Avenue with a high-pressure water hose for over an hour, with little lasting effect. The maple tree is now gone, disappearing sometime between 2015 and 2022 and replaced with a sapling.

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A Sonic Weapon

In 1952, a high-tech solution was attempted; playing an extremely high-pitched sound over great speakers to scare off the birds.

Though this solution was apparently temporarily effective, it must have proved not so in the long term; the sonic weapon isn’t mentioned again in any articles I could uncover. Another sonic attack was apparently attempted, with references made in a couple sources to starling distress calls being played over large speakers; this, too, was only temporarily effective, as the starlings would return the moment the distress call was muted, and nobody really wanted an acoustically-enhanced bird screaming in their neighborhood any more than the starlings themselves.

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…The Starlings Are Back

Winter after winter the starlings returned in force, seemingly no thinner from the previous season’s slaughter. They took up roosts on flagpoles, on cornices, on antennae, in parking garages, under eaves, under bridges. They were everywhere, and they were pooping to their little hearts’ content.

As the national starling population grew, flocks kept seeking out new geographical niches. Once daunted by the Rocky Mountains, the westward expansion of the starlings finally broke through in the late sixties. Starlings were now trans-national, coast-to-coast.

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Schieffelin’s Starlings

The below article delves into the source of these nuisance starlings, and it’s a bizarre one. Amateur ornithologist Eugene Schieffelin, of New York City, became chairman in 1877 of a then-fashionable endeavor, the American Acclimatization Society. The society’s goal was the introduction of “old world” animal and plant species to the “new world”, based on outdated natural theories formed before the widespread understanding of ecosystems and the effects of invasive species.

Though baseless, the legend tells that Schieffelin got it into his head to introduce species of birds mentioned in the Shakespearean canon, and decided to start with the starling. This move was probably unanimously supported by the entire Society, but it was Schieffelin who ended up with the yoke of blame. Sixty starlings were shipped from their native country–England, according to two sources, while the below article claims Germany. The starlings were meant to lend a beauty and grace to Central Park, much as sparrows were meant to gobble up the ubiquitous horse shit on the streets.

After years of attempts, starlings finally stuck fast in 1890, whereafter the birds did quite well; from New York City they spread in a wave, with populations growing and splitting and taking off for new habitats.

However, by the 1974 penning of the below article, the downtown Rochester population of starlings seem to have slaked off somewhat, falling from ~38,000 to ~18,000 birds. It seemed the birds had changed their preference from the high-rises of downtown to the spacious lawns and trees of the suburbs.

Below, a photo of Dr. Gerhard Leubner, starling counter for the Audubon Christmas Bird Count.

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The Mafia of the Bird World

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Here to Stay

Come the present day, starlings are still with us.

A newcomer to a land it was brought to against its will, the starling went on to find its own niche in our country. They weathered violent public reaction, murder by the tens of thousands, because they had no option. Starlings could not go home–like it or not, they were home. And we just have to accept that; after all, they never asked for this.

They just made the best of it they could.

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