1 The Bird Man Cometh Hope rode into Mount Vernon, New York, in the humid summer of 1959 with the arrival of the Bird Man. After a long train trip from Kansas, he checked into the $7-a-night Hartley Hotel downtown and unpacked the tools of his trade, among them some aluminum paddles, a noisy chime worn around his neck, and a gray double-padlocked metal box about two feet long. No one but the Bird Man was allowed to look inside the box, lest anyone spy the secret to completing the job he'd been hired to do: drive away the ten thousand or so European starlings infesting the city's trees, parks, and neighborhoods. The birds, with their din and copious droppings fouling side- walks and houses, had troubled the city for five decades, especially in the summer, and the city fathers had had enough. Five years earlier, desperate crews had mounted a loudspeaker in town that blasted the recorded shrieks of an injured starling. The noise drove the starlings away but not for long. In August 1959 the city signed a contract to pay the Bird Man $4,000 to send the starlings on their way for good. He claimed he'd done it in Louisville, Indianapolis, Wichita, and back home in Great Bend, Kansas. Where others had found only failure and disappointment shooing starlings around the country, it seemed the Bird Man had somehow found a way. "I do it with a secret method that I ain't going to talk about," he told curious reporters in his high-pitched twang after arriving in Mount Vernon. People ask me to chase birds and I chase 'em, but I didn't come 2,000 miles to tell you how it's done. You don't think a man who's as old as I am and has a secret worth half a million is going to blab it all away, do you? No, sir, not The Bird Man. I don't hurt them, but when I chase starlings, they stay chased. I can drive 'em out of one tree and into another if I want to. I can drive 'em out of Cleveland and into Cincinnati if I want to. I can do anything with 'em because I know all about 'em, that's my secret. The enigmatic hero, described by one reporter as a "vigorous, wizened little man," was Otto D. Standke. He was seventy-one, bespectacled, and fond of having a cigar in his mouth. Before he got into bird chasing, he'd sold phonographs for Columbia and worked as a salesman and furniture buyer for Montgomery Ward. In Mount Vernon, he wore a pin on his lapel claiming that he'd made more than $1 million in sales during his career. On his tie was an engraved silver clip that read "The Bird Man." Standke had stumbled onto his latest enterprise a decade earlier. Every summer thousands of starlings roosted in the elms of a city park in Great Bend. The birds had taken over--even band concerts were canceled. City officials had tried to scare them away by planting aluminum owls in the park. "The starlings liked 'em so much they took to roosting on their heads," Standke said. Frustrated that the city had spent $1,500 on the failing fake owls, Standke had taken matters into his own hands. One night he sneaked down to the park's bandstand with a flashlight and caught twenty-four starlings by hand, according to the story he told. He spirited them back to his pheasant and turkey farm and released them into a barn. He spent the next two months studying their every move, eschewing "tomfool books" and learning firsthand how starlings worked, he said. The next summer, he went to the park and cleared out the birds using his own still-confidential method for chasing them away. "They haven't been back since," he bragged in Mount Vernon. The Bird Man couldn't get to work soon enough, as far as the Mount Vernon locals were concerned. The starlings had been a terrible fixture for far too long. Thirty years earlier, just after dawn on an October morning in 1929, thousands of starlings and blackbirds had descended on the city, hungry and obnoxious. Most ate their fill and moved on; hundreds more died on the spot, exhausted. "Patrolman Charles Schulz said that while walking along one of the business streets, the skies seemed to rain birds upon him and he took shelter in a doorway," one news account said. Decades later a local recalled when the starlings moved into a quiet, sweet- smelling neighborhood: "Gone suddenly were the peaceful evenings in that New York City suburb, where previously only sweet birdsong and the sound of children at play broke the silence; instead the air was filled with shrill screeches that resembled nothing so much as fingernail scratchings on a blackboard. On any fine evening during the starling invasion, sensible pedestrians carried open umbrellas and stepped cautiously." The situation was no better a few miles away in the heart of New York City. Starlings once famously roosted by the thousands at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But by the spring of 1959 the biggest flocks--enormous, twisting sheets of birds in the sky numbering fifty thousand to a hundred thousand--had taken up residence on the steel girders supporting the Riverside Drive Viaduct. They arrived in the evening in dark clouds of wings and feathers, pro- duced an all-night racket in the neighborhood, and slipped away at dawn. They had a reputation as being noisy, filthy, and utterly unlovable, occasionally causing a stir when they collided with the girders and suddenly, surreally, fell dead from the sky. Whether the people of Mount Vernon and New York City knew it or not, they were living a shared experience with people across the continent, urban and rural alike. After European starlings were introduced just a few miles away in Central Park in the late 1800s, they had marched across America like a conquering army. They were ravenous, loud, tenacious, and quick to breed. Hundreds became thousands became millions and, in time, hundreds of millions. In the air, great flocks swirled in mesmerizing clouds like giant ribbons of black smoke writhing above the horizon in a rhythm only they seemed to understand. On the ground, the effect was much more sobering. Starlings could descend on a crop and eat a year's worth of effort in a day or two. City trees swayed under the smothering weight of roosting starlings, and buildings and sidewalks were coated with excrement. Sometimes they stayed for weeks or months or even longer. They seemed as fickle as they were fearless. A nuisance at best, they bordered on apocalyptic when viewed through the darkest lens. Excerpted from Starlings: The Curious Odyssey of a Most Hated Bird by Mike Stark All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
