Starling Plague

A disagreeable bird is the starling. Small, dark, impudent and noisy, its only commendable trait is a fondness for potato bugs. Most dismaying is its inexhaustible enthusiasm for reproduction. Vegetarian more often than insectivorous, starlings strip cherry trees, peck at strawberries, punch holes in lettuce leaves. Their voices are as rough as crows; they fight constantly among themselves. A nuisance already in many a U. S. town, starlings had by last week become a pest in the national capital. Washington citizens wrote letters to the newspapers. It seemed only a matter of days until some starling would visit an indignity upon President Hoover.

A spacious, quiet city, Washington is ideally suited to the winter diversions of starlings, which chiefly include chaffering, feeding, dropping, breeding. Nesting in eaves and sycamore trees along Pennsylvania Avenue, crowding the gutters of the White House roof, congregating on the cornices of the Capitol, they made the scene monotonous. So many roosted and fluttered among the lights of the Fox Theatre that patrons found it difficult to read the names of cinema players there exhibited.

Remedies for the starling plague were suggested, some facetious, some earnest, all equally inefficacious. Some citizen urged sawing down trees where starling; had nested. Others suggested that protective legislation upon starlings be revoked and a bounty substituted; that Roman candles be fired into starling roosts after dark; that nets be spread, flocks taken and dumped in the river.

Experts and experiment showed that the starlings, in flocks of thousands, were as fearless as they were annoying. Washington's plague continued without abatement.

All U. S. starlings are the descendants of a small shipment brought from England in 1890 and loosed in Central Park, Manhattan. As in the case of English sparrows, imported 1850 by the Brooklyn Institute, the birds were to be used as insect killers. So troublesome did both starlings and English sparrows soon become that 25 years ago the Lacey law was passed prohibiting the importation of any variety of bird without the consent of the Secretary of Agriculture.

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