Book Birthdays celebrate one year of a book’s life in social media posts, reviews, and more. This month we’re saying Happy First Book Birthday to Starlings: The Curious Odyssey of a Most Hated Bird (Nebraska, 2025) by Mike Stark.
About the Book:
Has there ever been a more hated bird than the European starling? Let loose in New York City’s Central Park by a misguided aristocrat, the starlings were supposed to help curb insect outbreaks and add to the tuneful choir of other songbirds. Rather than staying put, the dark and speckled starlings marched across the continent like a conquering army. In less than sixty years, they were in every state in the contiguous United States and their numbers topped two hundred million. Cities came under siege; crops buckled beneath their weight. Public sentiment quickly soured.
A bitter, baffling, and sometimes comical war on starlings ensued. Mike Stark’s Starlings is a first-of-its-kind history of starlings in America, an oddball, love-hate story at the intersection of human folly, ornithology, and one bird’s tenacious will to endure.
A Word from the Author:
One of the small thrills of having Starlings out in the world has been hearing how it has made some people rethink their views on these oft-villainized birds. None of us are immune from issuing reflexive judgements, whether toward wild things or our fellow neighbors. But the truth is usually more complex (and interesting) than those simple reductions.
Among many American bird-lovers, starlings have a hardened reputation as noisy, invasive, pesky, and messy. They’re all those things but also capable of remarkable mimicry, brilliant adaptations and incredible patterns in the sky. And their origin story in America is one driven by human foolishness, even if well-intentioned. With Starlings, I tried to capture all of that and give readers a chance to know these complicated backyard birds (and their equally complicated history) in a more nuanced way. It’s been gratifying that some readers have taken it to heart. “I will say I think differently on starlings now,” one reader wrote to me recently. One sent me photos they’d taken of starling murmurations in the sky and another told me that she, too, had been wrestling ethically over how to think about nonnative species that had made themselves at home where she lived.
Despite the title, Starlings is often about people and our paradoxical relationship with nature. Why do we move wild animals around the globe, even to places where we know they don’t belong? How do we respond when our own experiments (however misguided) spiral out of control? How do we react when nature inevitably reminds us that we can’t bend everything to our own will?
After the book came out, I spoke at conferences, book groups, on podcasts, and in magazines, framing the book’s audience as the “starling-curious” and the “starling-furious.” It was fascinating to see what attitudes readers brought to the book and whether Starlings at least widened their perspective.
Some didn’t budge. After all, we’ve been hating these birds for more than a century, chasing them off with guns, poisons, explosions and all manner of devices. Old habits die hard. Others, though, seemed to come away with a bit more understanding—dare I say a dash of grace?—for this stranger in our midst. In these times, avian and otherwise, perhaps that’s the best we can hope for.
Awards:
- Named a 2025 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
- Fourth Place for the Arizona Authors Association Literary Award
Reviews:
“This combination of human and natural history is a captivating read.”—Nancy Bent, Booklist
“Rarely will you find a book so meticulously researched in such a variety of fields from Mozart to chemical warfare. It turns out that there is an awful lot to learn about Common Starling.”—Rob Hume, Birdwatch
“This compelling book hits its stride with a ghastly chronicle of every tactic humans have employed in the battle against massive flocks and hopeless odds. A flying foe dances away from gun, cannons, powdered and gaseous poisons.”—Julie Zickefoose, Wall Street Journal
“This book belongs in any reader’s library of unintended consequences.”—J. Kemper Campbell, Lincoln Journal Star
“Starlings is both highly readable and deeply entertaining, tracing how starlings went from solution to problem. Stark’s book dips and weaves like a starling murmuration from theme to theme, following how Americans have thought about and dealt with their feathered immigrant neighbors.”—Catherine McNeur, H-Environment
“Starlings is at once one of the most entertaining, readable, and profound bird books I have ever read. It is clearly from a writer of many gifts.”—Bob Musil, Rachel Carson Council
“Balanced and reflective, Starlings calls on readers to challenge their prejudices and misconceptions of one noisy three-ounce blackbird, a vital step in our own journey to recast the meaning of belonging on a chaotic and increasingly violent Earth.”—Julie Dunlap, Washington Independent Review of Books
“Starlings is an important work for the present day. It shows how intertwined the story of humanity is with the damages association with the spread of exotic starlings, and that for all the troubles these birds cause, they are more scapegoats than culprits.”—Samuel Schurkamp, Ornithological Applications
In the Media:
The Gilded Age and Progressive Era
UNP blog 