Starship Asterisk*

Ann wrote:

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Photo: Owen Humphries

Recently, over Scotland (I think), a large flock of starlings was temporarily taken over by the great E.T. Bird in the Sky. The Bird took over the starlings, made them scan the landscape around them and had them report what they saw.

Presumably the starlings were then let go to fly about their usual starling business.

• The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

http://birdsofbard.blogspot.com/ wrote:
Bioinvasion: From Old World to New
By Chad Cohen, National Geographic, January 23, 2001

<<Shakespeare compared sparrows to angels that could awaken dreamers from feathery beds. He mused on larks singing at the gates of heaven and the love songs of robins. Birds of all feathers flutter throughout the works of the bard. From the majesty of their flight to the sweet sounds of their songs, the imagery they evoked captured the imagination of generations. So much so that, in 1890, an eccentric New Yorker and Shakespeare fanatic named Eugene Schieffelin felt compelled to introduce all the birds of Shakespeare to the United States.

“In the 1800s, there was a lot of this, a lot of societies bringing things over,” says Joe DiCostanzo, a bird specialist for the American Museum of Natural History. DiCostanzo says Schieffelin was not the only person to share the flora and fauna of the Old World with the new. Immigrants tried to introduce all kinds of birds, plants, and animals in the late 19th century to remind them of home. “Most of [the bio-introductions] don’t work; most of them die out; they just don’t fit in,” says DiCostanzo. “But some of them did. Unfortunately some of them did too well, things like starlings, I see starlings flying by us right now.”

The starling’s ability to mimic human speech earned the bird this cameo in Shakespeare’s Henry IV: “The king forbade my tongue to speak of Mortimer. But I will find him when he is asleep, and in his ear I’ll holler ‘Mortimer!’ Nay I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but Mortimer, and give it to him to keep his anger still in motion.” It is the only mention of the starling in all of Shakespeare. Yet it was enough to inspire Schieffelin to import 60 of the fruitful birds to the United States and release them one March day in New York’s Central Park. “The very first nests were here, under the eves of [New York City’s] Museum of Natural History,” says DiCostanzo, “And from those first few starlings, [which] might be considered the Adam and Eve of North American starlings, we now have 200 million.” These 200 million—together with their other feathered friends like house sparrows, and pigeons—make up the majority of the birds most Americans see everyday. None of these are native to the United States. The invaders compete for food with native birds like purple martens and eastern bluebirds, which have been pushed to the brink of extinction. Since the locals tend to fly south for the winter, the foreign birds that are here perenially have an advantage when it comes to nesting spots. “There’s no place for the native birds to come back after their migration,” explains DiCostanzo. “They just get forced out and if they can’t nest, eventually the population is going to go down. And that’s been one of the big problems. I don’t know how [Schieffelin] would feel knowing that the bird he introduced with just 60 birds in central park has become 200 million,” concludes DiCostanza. “He might feel he’s accomplished his goal of bringing this bird of Shakespeare over here. The starling is probably more familiar to people now than Shakespeare...in a lot of the country.”>>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Schieffelin wrote:
<<Eugene Schieffelin (b. New York 1827; d. Rhode Island 1906) belonged to the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society and the New York Zoological Society. In 1890, He released 60 starlings into New York City’s Central Park. He did the same with another 40 birds in 1891. It is said (though there is no evidence to support this) that his motivation was to allow New Yorkers to see all the birds mentioned in the plays of William Shakespeare; more likely he was merely trying to control the same pests that had been annoying him thirty years earlier, when he sponsored the introduction of the House Sparrow to North America. Schieffelin belonged to the Acclimation Society of North America, a group with the seemingly laudable, if misguided, aim of aiding the exchange of plants and animals from one part of the world to another. In the 19th Century, such acclimatization societies were fashionable and supported by the scientific knowledge and beliefs of that era, as the effect that non-native species could have on the local ecosystem was not yet known.>>

Ann wrote:

Click to view full size image

Photo: Owen Humphries

Recently, over Scotland (I think), a large flock of starlings was temporarily taken over by the great E.T. Bird in the Sky. The Bird took over the starlings, made them scan the landscape around them and had them report what they saw.

Presumably the starlings were then let go to fly about their usual starling business.

Ann

Beyond wrote:
Gee, the only thing i see, is a swirling swarm of startled starlings. How dull.

Ann wrote:Reminds me of when I joined a historical tour of Lund, a circa thousand-year-old city in southern Sweden. The tour leader, an archaeologist, stopped us at the great square of Lund and told us, enthusiastically, how he had been part of a team that unearthed a thousand-year-old latrine there.

"It was marvellously well preserved!" he enthused. "The contents were as fresh as if they had been left there yesterday! It was fantastic to analyse the feces to see what the early inhabitants of Lund had eaten... we found cherry stones in it!"

Ann

geckzilla wrote:
Cool! It's another non-miracle being called a miracle, though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle wrote:
<<The word "miracle" is often used to characterise any beneficial event that is statistically unlikely but not contrary to the laws of nature, such as surviving a natural disaster, or simply a "wonderful" occurrence, regardless of likelihood, such as a birth. Other miracles might be: survival of an illness diagnosed as terminal, escaping a life-threatening situation or 'beating the odds'. Some coincidences may be seen as miracles.

• Thomas Jefferson (died July 4, 1826), third President of the United States, edited a version of the Bible in which he removed sections of the New Testament containing supernatural aspects as well as perceived misinterpretations he believed had been added by the Four Evangelists.
  
  John Adams (died July 4, 1826), second President of the United States, wrote, "The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles?" On July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, Adams died at his home in Quincy. His last words have been reported as "Thomas Jefferson survives" (Jefferson himself, however, had died hours before Adams did).>>

• "Three Doors from the Inn, is the House where he was born, as small and mean as you can conceive. They shew Us an old Wooden Chair in the chimney corner, where He sat. We cutt off a Chip according to the Custom. *A MULBERRY TREE* that he planted has been cutt down, and is carefully preserved for Sale.>> - Warren Hope & Kim Holsten, _The Shakespeare Controversy_ (1992)