In 1890, a New York bird enthusiast released several dozen starlings in Central Park. No one knows for sure why Eugene Schieffelin set the birds aloft, but he may have been motivated by a sentimental desire to make the American Northeast more like the English countryside.
The consequences of his action were unintentionally massive. Today, there are nearly 200 million starlings in North America. Schieffelin was a member of the American Acclimatization Society, a worldwide effort to diversify local fauna and flora. Similar organizations existed in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. As the British acclimatization society put it, these organizations aspired to introduce “all innocuous animals, birds, fishes, insects, and vegetables, whether useful or ornamental.”
Schieffelin’s was not the first attempt to remedy perceived deficiencies in North American bird populations. Some members of these societies, often people with wealth, simply wanted to beautify their surroundings. Other acclimatizers had more pragmatic goals when they introduced exotic animals into new territories.
The house sparrow, camel, skylark, nightingale and various deer species were among the animals that acclimatizers introduced. And, despite the perception that these interlopers edged out native species, for the most part, acclimatization efforts neither thrived nor lasted. As an environmental historian, I am exploring both the successes and the failures of this movement as part of a larger historical study of animals that occupy the gray area between wildness and domestication.
The English or house sparrow, like the starling, is now among the most common North American birds. It was apparently introduced into the U.S. by a nostalgic Englishman named Nicolas Pike in 1850. The bird was subsequently reintroduced in various locations in the eastern U.S. and Canada. Nearly two decades later, the sparrow’s adaptation to North America was a noteworthy passerine triumph.
In 1868, The New York Times celebrated the “wonderfully rapid increase in the number of sparrows which were imported from England.” They had done “noble work” by eating the inchworms that infested the city’s parks, described by The Times as an “intolerable plague.”
The reporter praised the kindness of children who fed the sparrows and those who subscribed to a fund that provided birdhouses for “young married couples.” He promised that, if they continued to thrive, English sparrows would be claimed as “thoroughly naturalized citizens.”
But only two years later, the tide was turning, and people soon came to a different conclusion. A headline in The Times read: “Our Sparrows. What They Were Engaged To Do and How They Have Performed Their Work. How They Increase and Multiply—Do They Starve Our Native Song-Birds, and Must We Convert Them Into Pot-Pies?”