Shakespearean Legacy Flying Rats Infest Boston

Boston’s
legendary, ongoing celebration of incompetence, malfeasance and the
art of the bureaucratic boondoggle, otherwise known as the Big Dig,
has enlivened the lives of locals for over ten years now. Beguiled
by the cost
overruns (to the tune of $10 BILLION), insider contracts, missed deadlines
(over 100 years, cumulatively) constant multiple arterial
bypasses, a slowly devolving urban eyesore, daily delays
and traffic bottlenecks, and recently, hundreds of leaks threatening
its stability, we often overlook the marvelous secondary effects of
this gargantuan project. Take, for example,
the thousands of starlings displaced by the razing of their ancestral
roosts in the skeletal superstructure of the old Green Line station
and tracks running past North Station and the Fleet Center…

Each day at dusk since mid-November, thousands of starlings
swarm toward the cornices, ledges, and fire escapes of the area’s historic
buildings, where they roost. When they fly away at dawn, the birds leave
behind a mess: Awnings, signs, and sidewalks are covered with bird droppings.

The birds have been likened to flying rats, and their
calls compared to the screech of nails on a schoolroom blackboard. Sixty
of the medium-size, black-feathered scavengers were introduced to the
United States in the 1890s by a man who wanted to populate Central Park
with every bird species mentioned in William Shakespeare’s plays. Within
20 years, flocks of 100,000 starlings soared through North American skies.

Starlings
and Massachusetts have had a long and somewhat contentious relationship.
Officials at Logan Airport began an extensive
bird-control program after a flock of starlings was sucked into a jet’s
engines in 1960, causing the plane to crash, killing 62 people on board.
After starlings repeatedly fouled two statues of James Michael Curley
in a Congress Street park, the city replaced the park’s zelkova trees.

from the Boston Globe