Hello, Adventurers!
I have started to dig into and organize the photos I took of Bedichek documents at the Briscoe Center. I found this gem and just had to share it. It is a letter to the editor that Great-Granddaddy composed and sent after noting a short article in the newspaper (attached to the top of the letter in the first photo) about the sighting of an unusually large flock of European Starlings.
This letter is a great example of his artistic literary style. I love it. He references an Ancient, of course (learn more about Pliny here). With a quick search, I could not find Pliny's exact reference to the European Starling.
According to this article, the Starlings' impact on local birds has not been so detrimental as Great-Granddaddy had feared. It seems humans have been more annoyed than other birds! As he notes, all the European Starlings in the US are "descended from 100 birds set loose in New York's Central Park in the early 1890s. The birds were intentionally released by a group who wanted America to have all the birds that Shakespeare ever mentioned...Today, more than 200 million European Starlings range from Alaska to Mexico." (source)
Wow!!
If you have not been lucky enough to see a starling murmuration in person, here are a couple of good videos. Starling Murmuration 2020 and Flight of the Starlings. I actually saw a small murmuration on the last day of my trip but was not able to capture it on video.
How did he know of that ancient history, if he did not have access to google?
Nice post, Karen. While the starlings' murmurations are indeed quite awesome, in smaller numbers they are a nuisance in our back yard as they empty our suet feeders in no time.