Starlings and Humans on the Continuum of Life

A review by Capper Nichols

Mozart’s Starling, by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

Little, Brown, and Company, 2017

288 pages, softcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 14944 

Out in the California desert, a dozen starlings perched in the branches of a spindly honey mesquite. The tree grew out of a concrete island at a roadside oasis, a combo gas station, convenience store, and fast food restaurant just north of the Salton Sea. When I got out of my car, none of the birds moved, though I stood within a half dozen feet of them. They remained just as they were, hunched and dark and iridescent, waiting for someone to drop a french fry. I shuddered.

In the opening pages of Mozart’s Starling, Lyanda Lynn Haupt acknowledges the starling’s bad reputation and describes some of the good reasons for it. She knows that the North American reader almost certainly comes to the subject with a feeling of dislike, even disgust. If it had been almost any other species in that honey mesquite tree, the proximity would have charmed me. Even the few scavenger seagulls lingering nearby were more appealing creatures. 

But Haupt’s opening acknowledgement of such attitudes is only, it’s clear, a prelude to an effort to change the reader’s mind about the European Starling. Or maybe not change it completely, but at least open it up some. I was resistant to this obvious strategy of reverse psychology, but in the end she brought me around, at least to some degree.

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