When I traveled to Paris for a wedding a few summers ago, I was obviously excited to explore the city and celebrate with my dear friends. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was nearly as excited to see a bunch of European birds that we Americans don’t often get to enjoy. I slipped away to a park one morning and saw goldcrests that reminded me of our golden-crowned kinglets, impossibly cute long-tailed tits, and charismatic Eurasian jays. I saw some delightful European robins, the namesake of our unrelated American ones, and was pleased to see the much-maligned European starlings on their home turf. But I also saw one familiar bird that I hadn’t expected to find on foreign shores. Mixing with mallards, mute swans, and Mandarin ducks on a lake in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne, I found a whole flotilla of Canada geese.
With all the ink that’s been spilled about foreign species like house sparrows and European starlings that have become established in the United States, I was surprised how little I could find written about American birds that have become naturalized in other countries. And American birds have, in fact, become quite widespread.
Just like they did in the United States, European settlers established acclimatization societies in other countries they colonized, which then imported American birds. Just like the sportsmen who imported pheasants and chukars in America, wealthy sportsmen in other parts of the world sought out American game birds to enhance their options when they felt the ones evolution provided had come up short. And no matter whether birds are American, European, African, or Australian in origin, exotic pets have a way of escaping containment.
Thanks for reading Bird History! If you made it this far, please consider subscribing for free to my Substack to receive my new posts by email and support my work.
As soon as Europeans reached the new world, they began an aggressive exchange of animal life across the Atlantic Ocean. Birds that were novel or economically useful were the first ones to travel. Only twenty years after Columbus reached the Western Hemisphere, for example, domesticated turkeys from Mexico were being cultivated in Spain and spreading rapidly through the continent. In the early 1600s Samuel de Champlain sent King Louis XIII of France a gift of several pairs of Canada geese. Enough shipments followed that by the mid-1700s Canada geese had established populations throughout France, England, and Ireland. It didn’t take long for them to become just as annoying to European park-goers as they are to their American counterparts.
Bobwhites quickly became a favorite game bird among American colonists, and it wasn’t long before they too were exported abroad. By 1812 Alexander Wilson could write that they had been introduced to Jamaica, “where they appear to thrive greatly.” There were attempts to naturalize bobwhites in England by 1831, and by 1854 they had been set free in France. One shipment of bobwhites to Europe included 5,000 live birds. According to John Phillips, writing for the Bureau of Biological Survey in 1928, there was also an attempt “on quite a large scale” to introduce bobwhites in China, “but most of them arrived in bad condition after their long journey, so that nothing ever came of it.”1
It’s easy to see the spread of some birds as all but inevitable. Turkeys, chickens, and pigeons are so useful that people all over the world have gone to great lengths to import and cultivate them. But these introductions are the exception—more often, introductions depend on the decisions and motivations of just one or two individuals, as well as a hundred historical contingencies and a fair bit of luck.
This is the case for the California quail in Chile, which first arrived in 1864 when a man named William Groves moved to Valparaiso with a dozen quails he brought from California. He kept the birds on his farm until they escaped and became established in the wild. Twenty years later, another American settler in Chile imported quail from San Francisco and released them deliberately. By 1914, they could commonly be found for sale in public markets, both alive and dead. In 1920, a man named Carlos Reed brought fifty California quail from Chile to Argentina, and seeing promising results there he shipped over another four thousand in 1922. Today, California quail are widespread in western Argentina. In Chile, their range stretches nine hundred miles north to south.2
Plenty of like-minded Europeans tried to introduce American songbirds in their countries as well. An 1892 newspaper article from Eagle River, Wisconsin described how “A number of experiments have been made, in Germany as well as England, having in view the acclimatization and propagation in the open of some of the prettiest American birds.” Most of these were small-scale attempts, as with “Baron von Cramm, a wealthy nobleman with a hobby for birds,” who released several pairs of cardinals on his estate which survived through the winter and raised a brood of chicks in the wild the following spring. The same newspaper reported that mockingbirds, catbirds, rose-breasted grosbeaks, blue jays, purple finches, and even summer tanagers “have been doing nicely in the open in different parts of Germany.”3
One German ornithologist, Dr. Carl Russ, said that several American birds were “easy to acclimatize over there, and that because of several sterling qualities possessed by all of them they would make very valuable acquisitions to the list of European birds.” Russ advocated for introducing American birds like the mockingbird because it is “one of the largest and most voracious destroyers of insects, hence of great benefit to the agriculturist.” In spite of these sentiments, none of these birds were ever released in numbers great enough to establish self-sustaining populations, and ultimately they never took hold.
However interested they were in introducing foreign birds to their home countries, the Europeans who colonized islands in the Pacific were far more aggressive. Because these islands are so remote, their plants and animals descend from the rare few species that occasionally managed to arrive from distant mainlands. That isolation produced ecosystems with limited diversity and many unfilled niches, making it particularly easy for introduced species to become established, and particularly destructive to native species when they do. They were perfect settings for settlers to live out their fantasies of ecological domination.
In 1938 a man by the name of Eastham Guild wrote to The Avicultural Magazine that while Tahiti was a tropical paradise in most respects, “for some reason there is practically no bird life.” In his letter, he detailed his attempts to remedy the situation. “Since the climatic conditions were favourable and the profusion of grasses, weeds, and flowers provided a variety of foods,” he wrote, “I could see no reason why certain small birds from other countries of similar climate should not thrive here.” Over the next two years, he released over 9,000 birds representing 54 species, among them California quail, western bluebirds, mountain bluebirds, scarlet tanagers, lazuli buntings, Anna’s hummingbirds, and pygmy nuthatches from the United States. Some of these succeeded in nesting once or twice after they were released, but most disappeared into the forest and were never seen again. While fifteen species of foreign birds eventually became established in Tahiti, the American birds introduced by Eastham Guild were not among them.4
In New Zealand, American birds had a little more success. In 1922 George Thomas wrote a report compiling all of the attempts to naturalize foreign species of animals and plants in New Zealand, including at least one hundred and thirty kinds of birds, fifteen of which were American. Like most attempted introductions the world over, many in New Zealand were so feeble that they never gave the hapless birds a chance. New Zealand’s government imported some canvasback ducks in 1905, but only two survived the journey. That same year they imported American black ducks, of which ten survived the trip and reared young, but none of these seem to have gotten established. Between 1867 and 1908, settlers also periodically released a small number of wood ducks without any more luck.5
As in other countries, game birds were the main focus of introductions. Twenty-two sharp-tailed grouse from Utah were released in 1876, and seventeen prairie chickens from Topeka, Kansas were released in 1879. Neither of these species became established, and the dozens of mountain quail they released a few years later fared no better. In 1898 someone released four hundred bobwhites, but these too had disappeared by 1909.
Not all of their attempts were destined for failure. California quail were first introduced in 1867, and large numbers were released periodically in the following years by local acclimatization societies. These birds took hold well enough that before long they graduated to the status of agricultural pest. In 1905 the government imported several dozen Canada geese, which were distributed to acclimatization societies throughout the country and released at lakes, and by 1922 they were considered an established species. Wild turkeys were also frequently released, and achieved an enduring status as a popular game bird.
The American bird that became naturalized most recently may also be the one that’s caused the most damage. In the 1950s, a group of ruddy ducks escaped from wildfowl collections in England, began breeding in the wild, and then spread throughout continental Europe. The problem with Ruddy Ducks is that they interbreed with the closely-related White-headed Ducks, whose population is threatened. Spain and England sponsored programs to cull ruddy ducks, which largely—but not entirely—killed off the birds in their territory, although at considerable expense.
The quest to move birds around the world is a colonial project. It has been practiced almost exclusively by settlers seeking to improve the land they have colonized, or import new and exciting species from lands their countrymen have settled. In the process, birds are reduced to little more than trophies or commodities. They’re removed from the context from which they evolved—it doesn’t matter that the birds are American, they might as well be Ugandan or Chinese. They’re judged solely on their aesthetics or quality as a game bird, with little thought for the impact they might have on the ecological communities they land in.
As far as I can tell, there are just seven American birds whose naturalized overseas populations have held on to the present day. Wood ducks, ruddy ducks, and Canada geese are all widespread in Western Europe; feral snow geese are also sometimes found breeding in the wild. There’s a thriving population of California quail in Argentina and Chile, and they also run wild in Corsica and New Zealand. Northern bobwhites are common in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and are occasionally seen in northern Italy. The only country where turkeys are considered naturalized is New Zealand, but they’re cultivated the world over.
What’s surprising isn’t that there are California quail living in Chile or Canada geese living in New Zealand, but that there aren’t more species that became established. Most attempts at acclimatization, both in America and abroad, don’t become self-sustaining. With what we now know about invasion biology, it’s startling to see how cavalierly birds were introduced, both at home and abroad, just a few generations back. It’s a wonder that the number of introduced species that became naturalized is not higher, and it’s not for lack of trying.
- Wilson, Alexander. American Ornithology; or, The Natural History of the Birds of the United States. Vol. 6. Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep. 1812; Phillips, John C., “WILD BIRDS INTRODUCED OR TRANSPLANTED IN NORTH AMERICA” (1928). Publications from USDA-ARS / UNL Faculty. 819. ↩︎
- Andrews, B., Zurita, C. & Jaksic, F.M. The California Quail (Callipepla californica) in Chile and Argentina: introduction history, current distribution, and biological features. Rev. Chil. de Hist. Nat. 96, 2 (2023). ↩︎
- Eagle River review. (Eagle River, Wis.), 17 March 1892. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85040614/1892-03-17/ed-1/seq-1/> ↩︎
- Guild, Eastham. “Tahitian Aviculture: Acclimatization of Foreign Birds.” The Avicultural Magazine. Hertford: Stephen Austin & Sons, Ser. 5, Vol. 3, No. 1, p. 8. January, 1938; Guild, Eastham. “More About Birds in Tahiti.” The Avicultural Magazine. Hertford: Stephen Austin & Sons, Ltd. Vol. 9 no. 5, p. 104. September-October 1944. ↩︎
- Thomson, George. The Naturalisation of Animals & Plants in New Zealand. Cambridge: University Press. 1922, p. 98. ↩︎