When it gets warmer, fledgling European starlings start to show up at the wildlife rehabilitation clinic for all kinds of reasons: they’re sick or injured, they fell out of a nest, they ended up in a street, found themselves on someone’s front stoop, seemed helpless and assailable, too cute, too naked, too baby, too small. By the middle of June, we have something like 25 adolescent starlings screaming in the front windows of the ER at any given time, starlings I have to gather up at 9 pm for closing, either by picking them out of the plastic take-out container they’re bathing in, screaming; plucking them from the fake branches they’re perched on, screaming; or netting them as they try to escape, screaming.
When it gets warmer, my partner fills the fire escape with potted plants: cucumber, tomato, pepper, thistle, sunflower, ground cherry. For a few months, as the trees ensconcing our 3rd floor corner apartment grow denser and hotter, the fire escape becomes a fort, a verdant getaway in miniature.
When it gets warmer, I fly to Louisiana. I meet up with my mom and her brother in New Orleans, then I drive from Lafayette–where they were born and raised–dead south, all the way to the coast, where the land starts to dissolve into the Gulf of Mexico. My cousin Jennifer suggests the route. “Back roads all the way through Cameron Parish—I-10 is horrible between here and Houston,” she tells me on the front porch, gray clouds sitting low in the early morning sky.
As soon as I clear Abbeville, neighborhoods and strip malls open up into vast stretches of rice fields. Many of this country’s rice farms are in the alluvial plain of the Mississippi River, which gives the land a rich, water-retaining clay soil and opens it up to frequent flooding. Rice fields are also home to a famous regional crustacean: crawfish, which are “grown” and harvested in rotation with about a third of the farms in the area. As I drive further south, towards Pecan Island, I spot squat towers of mud–crawfish houses–springing out of the floodplain all over the place, and the rice fields eventually give way to swamps and waterlogged grasslands dotted with longleaf pines. There’s hardly anyone around, but there are markers: gas stations sporting Saints flags; boats pulled aground, sails torn and lines tangled; pickup trucks parked in turn-outs, drivers fishing in the grassy ditches lining the road.
My first stop is the Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge, in Grand Chenier. Google Maps leads me (I later realize) to either an unofficial side entrance or not an entrance at all, located among a series of doublewides lifted onto twenty-foot stilts: offices, I figure out, although whose and what for I can’t tell. One of the structures is boarded up, a blue tarp half-covering a huge gash in the roof—something I see a lot that day; the area was almost completely destroyed by Hurricane Laura in 2020, which brought high winds and a catastrophic 18 foot storm surge. Through an open gate and some ways into a vast stretch of patchy wetlands, I pull up onto a grassy ridge and get out of the car. The air is humid, the gray clouds from Lafayette transformed into a heavy blanket, threatening rain. I’m completely alone.
Then, as if summoned by my presence, I start to feel tiny taps against my skin and realize I’m being engulfed by mosquitos, huge swarms of them buzzing around my head and my neck, my arms, my legs, my ankles; I take off running, swinging my arms wildly, clapping my hands in front of my chest and behind my back and in front of my chest again, my limbs making contact with the insects, tiny taps turned to a distinctly fleshier “plat” each time they hit. One gets into my eye; I can feel its body tucked under the lip of my eyelid for one excruciating second before I wipe it out. Then, as quickly as they arrived, the mosquitos thin out. I stop running, stop swinging and clapping, and take a minute to catch my breath.
Then, as I stand there, wildlife of all kinds begins to emerge, nearly simultaneously, around me. A sora pokes out of the reeds near my feet. A pair of egrets hunt a couple of feet away from him, thin legs barely making a ripple in the duckweed. Where the duckweed clears there are a few alligators; one swims nonchalantly towards the ridge I’m standing on, tail forming long, slow S’s in the water. I spot a pied-billed grebe paddling close by and a large group of blue-winged teal chattering further out, and, in the distance, startled by something out of sight, I watch as a massive flock of red-winged blackbirds rise from the wetlands, flying in tandem, each bird joined to the next by invisible thread, each bird a pinpoint on a gridual wave, an almost-solid mass of birds another moving together without colliding in one undulating, slippery formation in the sky.
European starlings, when they gather in large flocks, mumurate too. It’s one of the most distinctive behaviors of blackbirds, a taxonomic family that starlings often (mistakenly) get grouped in with. Even in smaller groups, starlings are known for their style of communing–an elegant word for the way in which they get together and make a fucking racket. In farm towns, city parks, and urban neighborhoods across the country, starlings are notorious opportunists, scavengers, and troublemakers. They’re incredibly successful at driving competition away, and they’re known for being singularly aggressive and destructive, bullying woodpeckers and bluebirds for their nests and causing $800 million dollars in agricultural damage every year. Starlings come in mobs, taking over the tops of trees, gathering on power lines, and rustling through garbage on the sidewalk, where you can hear them mimicking the calls of other birds. When not engaged in imitation, starlings make any number of metallic, clicky, gnashy sounds, often seeming more machine than animal. They’re passerines that don’t sing songs, necessarily, but rather reflect, in their vocalizations, the natururban landscape that has come to define both their existence and ours.
In terms of sheer population, European starlings are the most successful bird in the United States; according to Nicholas Lund, there are probably more starlings in the U.S. than any other species. They were brought here in 1890 by a German immigrant and Shakespeare enthusiast named Eugene Schieffelin, who thought a great way to honor the Bard would be to introduce as many of Shakespeare’s play’s birds as possible to North America. That’s the legend anyway; the big picture probably includes additional intentional or accidental introductions across the continent. But this history is tossed around a lot as a quaint, endearing origin story, a kind of lark, illustrating common attitudes in a time when much less was known about how ecosystems work.
What struck me most, as I drove from Grand Chenier to Port Arthur and eventually onto Corpus Christi, was the tension between the abundance of wildlife–I estimated I saw tens of thousands of great-tailed grackles that day–and the total vulnerability of the ecosystem I was in. Louisiana has lost nearly 2,000 miles of coastland to the Gulf of Mexico over the last 80 years. An explosive study published by ProPublica in 2014 illustrated just how dire the situation is: at the current rates that the sea is rising and the land is sinking, most of southeastern Louisiana will be underwater in the next 50 years. Over coffee in New Orleans, my mom recalled the old statistic about football fields–one an hour, lost to the water–and my friend Delaney corrected her: “Now it’s every 48 minutes, a football field. Just since then.” (Do yourself a favor and check out Delaney’s fantastic piece in Al-Jazaeera about Louisiana oyster farmers and land loss, “On the trail of a pirate.”) There was one stretch of the highway, near Holly Beach, where the gulf came right up to the southernmost edge of the road, licking at the asphalt under my tires. I almost pulled over a few times–there was no one else out there, I could have easily stopped the car and walked around–but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, overcome with the feeling that it somehow wasn’t safe.
The fact is that our natural world is changing, being subsumed by the human one to the point that it seems increasingly unlikely that wildlife will bounce back to the rowdy multitudiousness it once was, or is even now. Even starlings, listed as “least concern” on the conservation status scale, have seen their population decline by nearly half what it was 50 years ago. That number–85.1 million–belies the problem; every other species has it much, much worse. (Piping plovers, which nest on the Rockaway beaches in NYC in spring and summer, number somewhere between 7,600 and 8,400.) Climate conditions and accidental or intentional introductions have boded well for other wildlife: nutria, a large semi-aquatic rodent, is native to subtropical and temperate South America, but was introduced to Louisiana for the fur industry, initially kept in enclosures. Then, sometime in the 1940s, a hurricane hit, and all the nutria got out; a non-native species, they’re known for causing severe soil erosion by eating, digging, and swimming their way through the wetlands (good for them, bad for us). It turns out extinction isn’t a cut and dry trajectory: sometimes it creates spaces for glut, for certain species of animals becoming as overgrown as kudzu, competing with their own kind for dominance.
In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, it’s Hotspur who brings up the starling as he tries to come up with ways to torment the king, against whom he rebels. “Nay, I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but ‘Mortimer,’ and give it to [Henry] to keep his anger still in motion,” he says, Mortimer being the name of King Henry IV’s sworn enemy. When I’m in the ER window with the starlings, I hear “Mortimer” over and over in their incessant screeching, so loud and so grating that my coworker requests earplugs in the Slack #supplies channel. There’s anger there, Henry’s, theirs, and mine. I’m bound by honor and principle to care for them, but I also carry a painful awareness of their impact on the local ecology. Yet starlings don’t have that kind of awareness. They’re just using what they have to get by, and what they have is a set of genetics and a highly adaptive personality well-suited for our world, even though their existence in that world is a fluke. It reminds me again about how surprising nature is, and how little we understand about how it works.
One of my favorite lines of poetry comes from Dana Levin: “There came a time / I couldn’t look at trees without / feeling elegiac — as if nature / were already over.” As soon as I stepped foot into the clinic for the first time, it became impossible not to notice the death present in everything. New York City is beyond harsh for the wildlife living here: herons swallow fishing hooks, hawks accidentally poison themselves by eating rats that have consumed rodenticide, migrating birds smash into skyscraper windows because they can’t tell glass from sky. I can’t ride my bike through the park without everything I know coming with me, infusing each moment I spend enjoying my beautiful city with the sense of that grief that Levin describes. And yet an elegy is also a commemoration. To commemorate requires complete attention, which is what an elegy asks of its readers: for them to bear witness to, to mark and monumentalize, life. This attention brings abundance, in a spiritual sense.
A lot of people think about nature as “out there” somewhere, a distinct place one can visit and return from. But nature is right here, right now, all the time. I’m as much in nature walking down my residential street in Brooklyn as I was when I was driving the Louisiana coastline, counting the number of pelicans flying low in a line beside my car. Seen this way, the question of abundance becomes a question of relativity. My residential street in Brooklyn has robins and house sparrows, dogwoods and tulips, lindens and oaks, rats and roaches, pollen and people, fig trees and callery pears. Relative to a purer past, before human activity blurred the boundaries between here and there, today’s New York City must seem like a biological madhouse. Relative to one of our potential outcomes, the timeline where most species of animals are extinct, every warbler, bee, black swallowtail, and mourning dove I encounter is a poem in and of itself. They’re what I lean into whenever I’m feeling the grief the hardest–noticing the fireflies in the park, noticing the helicopter seeds on the sidewalk, noticing the galactic splash of iridescent stars on a starling’s feathers, and appreciating all of it.
See you next month.
Thank you for this elegy, Suzanne.