Trash Birds

In the 1850s, Brooklyn was beset by a plague of worms. Every spring, as soon as trees began putting on their leaves, these moth larvae would strip the trees bare, hang webs between the branches, and drop onto “hat, bonnet, dress, and person, to the disquiet of everyone” hoping for a pleasant visit to the park. To fight the worms, an enterprising Englishman imported a few dozen house sparrows from his maternal home. And within a few years, the worms were gone. Did the sparrows deserve credit? Some said yes, some said no. But as the old lady who swallowed a fly learned, a remedy can be worse than the disease. The sparrows stuck around and became a greater pest than the worms had ever been.¹

Because of its taste for grains pecked from horse droppings and its “adaptive and phenomenal reproductive powers,” the house sparrow aggressively became the “commonest street bird” in one city after another. One observer, already fed up with other European immigrants, complained how sparrows would take over neighborhoods and turn them into “avian ghettos crammed with greedy, filthy, bickering clouds of a single alien species.” A quarter century after they first made landfall, sparrows were expanding their territory by an area about the size of Montana every year.²

The birds seemed to belong in the city, and exemplified the city’s worst attributes. Unlike the sweet songs of other backyard birds, the house sparrow’s grating squeak “harmonizes perfectly with the jarring sounds of man’s contriving” and “the clatter of iron-shod wheels over city pavements.” Their plumage was no more attractive than their song, and their behavior was somehow even worse. Their “clumsy, straggling nests” were strewn with “rubbish of all sorts and colors,” while their relationships were characterized by “combats, brawls, forcible divorce, and persecution of the unfortunate.” Worst of all, they seemed to chase from the city its resident native birds. A 1923 manual for birdhouses described how, “By squatter’s right, by sneaky intrusion, or by open assault, this foreign intruder takes possession of bird boxes, destroys eggs and young, and gradually presses blue birds, house wrens, chickadees, swallows, robins, and purple martins beyond the borders of their rightful heritage.”³

The way ornithologists talked about them, it seemed that house sparrows were single-handedly responsible for creating the tragic breach between Man and Nature. Whereas once America’s beautiful native birds mingled freely with European settlers, Robert Ridgeway complained in 1915 that the “extraordinary increase of the European House Sparrow [has] resulted in practical banishment from their former close association with human abodes of the Bluebird, Purple Martin, Barn Swallow, and Cliff Swallow.”⁴

In truth, it seemed like people were doing everything they could to drive songbirds from the city. They hardly needed the sparrow’s help. One Harper’s Weekly commentator wrote in 1892 that “The building of cities shuts out most of the sky and covers the face of nature with bricks and asphalt. The smoke and soot and dust from houses and factories fill the air with unpleasant odors, while the roar and hum of the thronging multitudes frighten the feathered songsters to the solitary woods.” Another writer added that as soon as a town becomes a city, “the birds are driven away, for no self-respecting singer likes to become an ingredient in a tenement-house pie.” It seemed that birds were not meant for the world humans had created. In his 1923 Birds of the New York City Region, Ludlow Griscom explained that “no bird can live on asphalt and concrete.”⁵

But he was evidently not counting house sparrows among their number. Or perhaps it was just that these urban birds existed as a class apart. House sparrows arrived in cities already infested with feral pigeons, which had been brought by European settlers as early as 1620. By the 1870s, pigeons and sparrows were joined by European Starlings, released by acclimatization societies hoping to populate the country with novel kinds of birds. The starlings proved just as objectionable as the sparrows to human and native bird alike, and just as comfortable living in the city.

These three city birds were all foreigners, immigrants, brought unwillingly to our shores. And once they started spreading beyond their initial beachheads, starlings and sparrows were opposed in terms of their foreignness. Students of nature were warned that house sparrows “should be carefully distinguished from the many other extremely desirable and useful native members of the sparrow family, which are in appearance quite similar to their noxious European cousins.”⁶

Since the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act, most native birds have been nominally protected by federal law. There are no protections, in contrast, for foreign sparrows, pigeons, and starlings. You can do with these un-American birds what you will. Even today’s birdwatchers disparage them as trash birds, not for what they eat, but for how lowly they’re esteemed. They barely count as birds, and certainly not as ones worth watching.

But in a curious transformation which mirrors the trajectory of many immigrant groups on American soil, this triumvirate of trash has made the city its own. They’ve become native to the city, and it’s now the native birds who seem foreign to the land of concrete and steel. Yet by becoming honorary urbanites, pigeons, starlings, and sparrows have lost something of their nature. Nature belongs “out there,” outside of cities and away from its artifice and bustle, unlike trash birds, who seem right at home with the city’s grime and clanging and trash and movement.⁷

Cities, of course, never lost their native birds. To his fellow Bostonians, “who assert that there are no longer any native birds in our city grounds… now [that] the abominable English sparrows monopolize every nook and corner,” the ornithologist Bradford Torrey implored, “Hath not a Bostonian eyes? And doth he not cross the Common every day?”⁸ The same sort of person who walks through a city without seeing birds could walk through a forest or prairie and see just as many there.

But even for the most ignorant city-dwellers, trash birds brought a spark of life. Some writers praised their populism, noting that the birds lived among the tenement-houses just as they did among the mansions with their private gardens. Others credited the birds with cleaning up the city, noting that they “gather the litter from the streets and sidewalks to build their nests”, and feed on stray crumbs and morsels of food that would otherwise pollute the city. Lucy Maynard wrote in 1902 that “in spite of their noise and filth… they give a certain life to the streets and parks and furnish some entertainment to children and house-bound invalids.”⁹

Children, house-bound invalids, and me. I was no better than those oblivious Bostonians until I first noticed — really noticed — a small clan of starlings pecking at the grass in front of an apartment tower. I’m sure my eyes had glazed over the birds dozens of times before, but on that day, for whatever reason, I paused to look, and look again. Starlings, it turns out, are beautiful birds. When they catch the light, their inky black feathers iridesce like an oil slick, dappled with tiny white spots that flash like a sea of stars. They don’t hop along the ground like sparrows and robins, but strut and waddle, almost like chickens, or like the tiny dinosaur that they are.

What caught my attention in that moment more than anything, though, was my ignorance. It took a few minutes of googling before I even learned their name. Starlings made me wonder what else I might be missing. They encouraged me to look up, and look around, at the other birds my world held.

When describing the bounty of birds found within Chicago in 1901, Edward Clark wrote how “the bluebirds, the scarlet tanagers, the cerulean warblers, the Baltimore orioles, the robins, nearly the whole tribe of native sparrows, the woodpeckers, and not infrequently the hawks and the owls, find rest and food within sound of the clanging bells of surface cars and the rumble of the wheels of elevated roads.”¹⁰ Yet all of these native birds were invisible to me until I first noticed starlings. And because they’re the birds that taught me how to see, I can’t look at them as lesser nature without lessening all of nature.

No, starlings, sparrows, and pigeons aren’t native to this continent, but neither is the post-industrial city. As hard as we might try to deny it, concrete and steel still make an ecosystem. The discarded crumbs on the sidewalk form the trophic base that puts meat on a pigeon’s bones and flesh in a Peregrine Falcon’s belly. Pandora’s box is open; the cat’s out of the bag. I can’t help but see this messy mixture as something holy.

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Earlier this spring, I wrote this piece for the Nature Writing in Cities course I took at the New York Botanical Garden, taught by the fantastic Russell Jacobs. If you enjoy my writing, you’ll love Russell’s. He has a Substack called Landlubber, where he writes about the places where land meets water, and humans meet nature. A big thanks to Russell and to the other students for their feedback on this piece.

1. Harper’s Weekly, January 31, 1874, vol. 18 pg. 103; “Houses for North Dakota Birds.” University of North Dakota Departmental Bulletin, Volume 7 No. 1. February, 1923. ↩︎
2. Graham, Frank., Buchheister, Carl W.. The Audubon Ark: A History of the National Audubon Society. United States: Knopf, 1990; George Ethelbert Walsh. “The Birds of our Cities.” Harper’s Weekly. March 19, 1892, pg. 286, vol. 36. ↩︎
3. Oliver Thorne Miller. Bird-Ways. United States: Houghton, Mifflin. 1885, p. 154; “Houses for North Dakota Birds.” University of North Dakota Departmental Bulletin, Volume 7 No. 1. February, 1923. ↩︎
4. Ridgway, Robert. “Bird-Life in Southern Illinois: Changes Which Have Taken Place in Half a Century.” Bird Lore. United States: Macmillan Company, 1915. ↩︎
5. George Ethelbert Walsh. “The Birds of our Cities.” Harper’s Weekly. March 19, 1892, pg. 286, vol. 36; “The Birds and the City.” Harper’s Weekly, April 13, 1901; Griscom, Ludlow. Birds of the New York City Region. United States: The Museum, 1923. ↩︎
6. “Houses for North Dakota Birds.” University of North Dakota Departmental Bulletin, Volume 7 No. 1. February, 1923. ↩︎
7. Coates, Peter. “Eastenders go west: English sparrows, immigrants, and the nature of fear.” Journal of American Studies 39, no. 3 (2005): 431-462. ↩︎
8. Torrey, Bradford. Birds in the Bush. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, & Co. 1885. ↩︎
9. George Ethelbert Walsh. “The Birds of our Cities.” Harper’s Weekly. March 19, 1892, pg. 286, vol. 36; Maynard, Lucy Warner. Birds of Washington and Vicinity: Including Adjacent Parts of Maryland and Virginia. United States: Woodward & Lothrop, 1902. ↩︎
10. Clark, Edward Brayton. Birds of Lakeside and Prairie. United States: A.W. Mumford, 1901 ↩︎