{"id":157,"date":"2004-01-09T17:40:49","date_gmt":"2004-01-09T21:40:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/desultor\/2004\/01\/09\/poor-lil-birdies\/"},"modified":"2004-01-09T17:40:49","modified_gmt":"2004-01-09T21:40:49","slug":"poor-lil-birdies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/2004\/01\/09\/poor-lil-birdies\/","title":{"rendered":"Poor Li&#8217;l Birdies"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a240'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Today I saw a &#8220;bevy&#8221; of starlings roosting in a tree.  It is cold here, and their feathers were ludicrously puffed out in every direction &#8211; they looked almost spherical.<\/p>\n<p>Now, I know that properly I&#8217;m supposed to despise and fear starlings &#8211; they&#8217;re European imports, not at all native to North America &#8211; they displace native songbirds and they don&#8217;t sing prettily at all.  They can make you feel really weird and threatened when they swoop in by the thousand, carpeting treebranches with their bodies and filling ears with their eerie metallic screeching.<\/p>\n<p>But all the same, if starlings may properly be likened to a cat they are certainly out of the bag &#8211; one imagines they must have been introduced to North America decades ago, and the ones now freezing in Massachusetts may well have as many generations of American ancestors as George Bush, even.<\/p>\n<p>Again I defy nativism!  I like starlings!  It&#8217;s not their fault they sing so ugly.  And they stick together admirably.  And Old World sources write of them as possessing the power of speech.<\/p>\n<p>I hope they make it through the winter all right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today I saw a &#8220;bevy&#8221; of starlings roosting in a tree. It is cold here, and their feathers were ludicrously puffed out in every direction &#8211; they looked almost spherical. Now, I know that properly I&#8217;m supposed to despise and fear starlings &#8211; they&#8217;re European imports, not at all native to North America &#8211; they [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}