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As they do every year, the starlings have come back to town. Their oil-slick bodies, iridescent in the sunlight, dot the lawn during the day; their chatter fills the air at dawn and dusk. Inevitably, they try to insert themselves into our home. We hear them scrabbling for purchase inside the dryer vent, their cries magnified by the metal tube. We rescue them from where they have landed inside the unused fireplace, a place they manage to reach despite the chimney cap and closed flue.
Once, a fledgling spent a tense day in a bush in our backyard, its mother making sharp warning chirps and hopping sentry along the wooden fence. When I called the bird rescue for advice, they brushed me off: Starlings are invasive. We don’t help them. I hung up, mortified by my ignorance and offended by their coldness. Then I kept watch over the bush and the bird, shooing away the neighborhood cats, until it was too dark to see. The fledgling and mother were gone the next day. I like to believe they lived.
♦
European starlings were introduced to North America in 1890 by a man determined to import every species of bird mentioned in William Shakespeare’s works. Most species, like mockingbirds and larks, died out quickly, but some of the starlings survived, then adapted, and eventually thrived. More than a century later there are over 200 million starlings in North America, their habitat spanning from Mexico to Alaska. They are often considered bullies and pests, they can transmit diseases and wipe out crops, but as someone whose relatives immigrated to this country around the same time, and at whom similar accusations were thrown, I can’t help but feel empathy toward them. They didn’t, after all, choose to come here; they are simply trying to live their lives.
♦
One day in 1982, while playing outside our farmhouse in the far reaches of northern Vermont, my brother found a baby bird lying in the grass under the kitchen windows. It was tiny and unfeathered, its eyes still shut tight and its neck not yet able to support its head. Its skin was so translucent that the blue outlines of its internal organs were distinctly visible. My brother picked it up and carefully carried it inside to my mother. Cupping the bird in his hands, he looked up at her, and asked, “You won’t let him die, will you?”
My mother was by this point a kind of expert in animal lost causes. In addition to our many other creatures, which included house cats, dogs, milking goats, a horse, and a pony, we also lived with two field mice, rescued from between a cat’s paws (and certain death) when they were still pink and sightless; a cat, her face permanently dented from a car crash and only a few stray teeth remaining in her mouth; and a very blind goat who had never been dehorned. Then there was the steady parade of temporary house guests—turtles rescued from roads, birds rescued from cats, and cats rescued from neglect and hunger—who found temporary refuge in our house until they were strong enough to be set free.
♦
My mother didn’t let the starling die, either. After it was determined too iffy to try to return him to his nest in the eaves, she kept him in the kitchen, feeding him cat food from the eraser end of a pencil every twenty minutes from sunrise to sunset. When she went to town to run errands, the starling came along. He grew larger and stronger, his body sprouting downy fuzz and feathers.
♦
That summer, the starling spent the days perched on my father’s shoulder, or the arm of his glasses, as he worked in the vegetable garden. He amused himself by poking his beak into my father’s ear, preening my father’s beard, and snapping eagerly at the clouds of blackflies that flew around them. In the back-to-school photos from that fall, my brother and I stand at the end of our driveway at the spot where it meets the rural dirt road; we hold lunch boxes in our hands and backpacks slung over our shoulders. The starling, by now sleekly feathered in brown juvenile plumage, is perched on my brother’s shoulder, head turned, beak pointed toward my brother’s ear canal. My brother, wearing a bright green trucker hat, pulls away from the oncoming attack while his face contorts with laughter.
♦
Cold season comes early in Northern Vermont, and it was not much later that the weather shifted and the starling began to get restless. He watched the sky carefully as other starlings gathered into flocks. As my mother, her long, dark hair wrapped into a braided crown around her head, and my father, bright yellow suspenders stretched across his back, harvested the fall crops, the starling flew out and back, out and back, as if anxiously wrestling with a difficult decision. Finally, the day came when he flew out into the flock and didn’t come back.
♦
It’s those mesmerizing and undulating flocks that protect starlings from predators, like falcons and hawks. I always hoped our starling chose a good one. Since starlings can live up to fifteen years in the wild, it’s possible that he outlived our time in that house, outlived my parents’ marriage, and outlived my childhood entirely, but we never saw him again. If he did, we didn’t know it. When the starlings returned in great flocks the following spring, we watched for our starling and listened for his unique cry, but no bird peeled off from the group to perch on our shoulders or dig his beak into our ears.
♦
Not so many years later, my parents’ marriage disintegrated, and my family split apart. My mother and I moved to a nearby town. My father and brother moved several states south. No longer a family with shared lives and experiences, our memories fracture and diverge after that. But, more than three decades later, the shared imprint of our starling remains. The flocks of his distant relatives—migrating in and out with the seasons, stumbling unbidden into my house—a reminder, bright and sharp, of what still binds us.
Beautiful.
Lovely descriptions of the beautiful things that can happen in the course of life.
What an amazing way to weave together a specific childhood memory with the ebbs and flows of life. Beautifully written.
Such a treat to read and to reflect on a childhood with a starling sibling.
Amazing write up! Thanks for this post