In 1890, one man released 60 birds in New York Central park. 135 years later, there are 200 million of them across America

Every single European starling flying over the US today, all 200 million of them, can trace its family tree back to one chilly morning in Manhattan in 1890. It's one of the wildest chain reactions in American history, and almost nobody planned it to happen.

On March 6, 1890, a wealthy New York drug manufacturer named Eugene Schieffelin walked into Central Park with wooden crates full of birds that had never before touched American soil. He opened the doors and let 60 European starlings fly free into the New York sky. A year later, in 1891, he did it again, releasing about 40 more.

At the time, nobody thought much of it. Releasing foreign birds and animals into the wild was a common hobby in the late 1800s, done by groups called "acclimatization societies," who believed importing new species could only enrich nature. Nobody understood the concept of an invasive species yet, that idea simply didn't exist.


Schieffelin's starlings did something almost none of the other imported birds of that era managed to do: they survived. Within weeks, naturalists spotted the first starling nest in North America, tucked under the eaves of the American Museum of Natural History, just steps from where the birds had been set loose.

How 60 birds became 200 million starlings

That handful of survivors didn't just take root, they exploded. Starlings turned out to be almost perfectly built for North America: aggressive, adaptable, able to eat nearly anything, and willing to nest in any nook a woodpecker or bluebird might otherwise use.

Within 50 years, they'd spread coast to coast. Today, European starlings live in all 50 states, roam from Alaska to Florida, and gather in flocks that can number over a million birds moving as one shimmering, swirling cloud, a phenomenon called a murmuration. Scientists now estimate the total North American population at roughly 200 million birds, making it one of the most successful, and most unwanted, biological invasions in the country's history.

They didn't stay welcome for long. Starlings outcompete native birds like bluebirds and woodpeckers for nesting spots, devour crops and livestock feed, and are blamed for close to a billion dollars in agricultural damage every year. In 1960, a flock of starlings even brought down a passenger plane in Boston, killing 62 people, still one of the deadliest bird-strike disasters in aviation history.

The Shakespeare Myth

Here's the twist: the story most people have heard about why Schieffelin did it might not be true at all.

For generations, the tale went that Schieffelin was a Shakespeare superfan on a mission to bring every bird mentioned in the Bard's plays and poems to America, starlings included, since the bird gets a single, brief mention in "Henry IV, Part 1." It's a great story. Nature writer Edwin Way Teale popularized it in 1948, and it's been repeated ever since.

But a 2021 academic investigation by researchers Lauren Fugate and John MacNeill Miller dug through the historical record and found no evidence Schieffelin ever said any such thing. No letters, no interviews, no firsthand accounts, the "Shakespeare fanatic" story appears to have been invented decades after Schieffelin died, then retold so often it hardened into fact. His actual motives are murkier: he was a member of the American Acclimatization Society, and one obituary claimed he simply wanted a bird that would eat the caterpillars destroying trees near his home.

Why the Story Still Resonates

Whatever Schieffelin's real reasons were, the outcome is undisputed: a release of roughly 100 birds, over two years, in a single city park, permanently altered the ecology of an entire continent. It's now a textbook case study for ecologists and conservationists warning about the dangers of introducing non-native species, a cautionary tale that keeps finding new audiences more than a century later.

Next time a shifting black cloud of birds swirls overhead, there's a decent chance every one of them is a distant descendant of that morning in Central Park.