It was a sunny day until a black cloud blocked out the sun. Except it wasn’t a cloud, it was a flock of starlings twisting and swooping through the sky.
This remarkable bit of avian choreography is called a murmuration. Starlings do it twice a year, spring and fall.
Apparently, it’s what’s left of their original migration flight back home in Europe. There, they migrate from the chilly climes of Norway to the balmy breezes of Egypt in the fall and back to the fjords again in the spring.
In America, they seem content to migrate back and forth from the city to the farm. Some murmurations will contain more than 100,000 birds, sallying back and forth together with astonishing precision.
Some bird historians say it started in 1848 when someone released a pair of starlings in New York’s Central Park. Others claim it was in Pennsylvania in 1850. Either way, the birds grew to enormous populations in a hurry.
It didn’t take long for the birds to become a major problem in large metropolitan areas. In New York City, their droppings made people sick, and by the early 1950s, the problem had reached epidemic proportions.
City leaders launched a campaign to get rid of them and soon hired a fireworks expert who rigged a complicated series of explosives among downtown skyscrapers. Everyone agreed it did little to deter the birds, but the nightly fireworks display was great entertainment.
In my hometown, the birds filled the trees and littered the sidewalks. The city council temporarily lifted the ban on discharging firearms within the city and offered a bounty of a nickel-a-bird. They even provided free gunnysacks to bag up the kill and labels for tallying the head count.
The response was immediate and overwhelming. Probably no one in City Hall knew how many residents actually owned shotguns, or how enthusiastically they would respond to the challenge. Night after night folks blasted away and filled their gunnysacks with dead birds.
Officials cancelled the program after only three weeks when they realized they had overlooked one important factor in their planning. The city jail was the designated drop off place for the dead birds, and it wasn’t long before the accumulation of overstuffed gunnysacks overwhelmed both the space and the air in the building.
A mass burial program was hastily imposed while prisoners were temporarily relocated to a neighboring county. It took a week to fumigate the place and return incarceration to its normal thrum.
Ultimately, the city paid out several thousand dollars in bounty payments, re-imposed the ban on discharging firearms, and quietly filed the starling program away in hopes it would soon be forgotten.
Some said the starlings never noticed.
