At 5:35 PM, Eastern Air Lines Flight 375 pulled away from the Logan Airport terminal. Five minutes later, it was cleared for takeoff. Moments after liftoff, the Lockheed L-188 Electra crossed paths with a flock of 10,000 starlings.
“They hit the front of the airplane, resembling machine gun fire,” Captain W. H. Jenkins would later recount. “Just brrrrrummm!”
The event unfolded over the course of 20 seconds, sending the plane crashing down into Boston Harbor. On impact, it broke into pieces, killing 62 passengers. Nine of the 10 who survived did so with serious injuries. The 1960 crash remains the worst bird strike in U.S. aviation history.
For most of the 19th century, there were no common starlings in the United States. By the 1950s, there were 50 million. These days, the glossy black birds have surpassed four times that figure. In terms of sheer Darwinian survival, the starling is a remarkable success story, breeding prolifically enough to dot the skies of an entire continent in less than a century.
In 1889 and 1892, the Portland Song Bird Club released 35 pairs of the birds into the Northwestern city. According to one contemporary account, “They were turned loose in the city of Portland near the city park, and have since increased remarkably well.” By the early following century, however, the birds vanished without a trace.
Groups formed to introduce European animals and plants into North America were all the rage in the late 19th century. One such organization, The American Acclimatization Society, carried the mission as a badge of honor. The New York City club was founded in 1871 with the express purpose of introducing "foreign varieties of the animal and vegetable kingdom as may be useful or interesting.”
Founder Eugene Schieffelin, a Manhattan-based drug manufacturer, had tried — and largely failed — to execute the mission over the course of several decades. Chaffinches, blackbirds, nightingales, pheasants and skylarks were, at best, a limited success. House sparrows proved a heartier lot, however. In 1869, poet William Cullen Bryant immortalized an evening spent watching Schieffelin release a crate of the birds in his yard in “The Old-World Sparrow.”
The insects legions that sting our fruit
And strip the leaves from the growing shoot,
A swarming, skulking, ravenous tribe,
Which Harris and Flint so well describe
But cannot destroy, may quail with fear,
For the Old-World Sparrow, their bane, is here.
It was Schieffelin’s well-known admiration for the works of Shakespeare that was said to have inspired much of his ornithological passions. One common — though unverified — story states that the drug maker sought to release every variety of bird mentioned in the Bard’s works. While perhaps apocryphal, this would certainly apply to the common starling, which receives a grand total of one mention in all of his poems and plays. In Henry IV, Part 1, Hotspur states, “Nay, I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but ‘Mortimer.’”
That the single mention is uttered in reference to its ability to drive humans mad perhaps ought to have been regarded as an early warning sign. But Schieffelin was undeterred. In 1890, he released 60 starlings into Central Park, followed by 40 more the following year.
When the first nesting pair was discovered soon after at the nearby Museum of Natural History, it was celebrated as a victory. For their first half-dozen years on the continent, the birds were rarely spotted outside of the island of Manhattan. In 1928, however, the first starling was spotted west of the Mississippi. By 1942, the birds had reached California.
Schieffelin died in Newport, Rhode Island in 1906 at age 80. No portraits of him exists, nor, apparently does a tombstone at Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery. A three-paragraph obituary fails to include The American Acclimatization Society among the numerous clubs to which he belonged. The starlings, too, garner no mention in the brief writeup. But more than a century after his death, with more than 200 million of the birds currently calling North America home, there can be no doubt about Schieffelin’s true legacy.
Sources:
European Starling http://nyis.info/invasive_species/european-starling/
100 Years of the Starling https://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/01/opinion/100-years-of-the-starling.html
Throwback Thursday: The Worst Bird Strike in U.S. History https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2017/10/05/bird-strike-boston-plane-crash/
Cooper Ornithological Club https://sora.unm.edu/sites/default/files/journals/pca/pca_019.pdf
Eugene Schieffelin Dead. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1906/08/16/101845370.pdf