Today I'd like to share with you the story of Eugene Chef one and his idea that seemed good at the time.

So Chef Lynn was born in New York City in 18 27 and in many ways he lived the American Dream.

Which is to say that he was born rich and remained so.

He was the seventh son of a famous family, and he worked for his father's pharmaceutical company.

He also loved birds and possibly Shakespeare, but more on that later.

At any rate, we know that shovel like to import European bird species and introduce them into New York City, for instance, he might have been the first person to introduce the House sparrow to North America.

He wanted to quote, exterminate the caterpillars, which infested the trees of Madison Park.

And who knows?

He might have been successful.

I haven't seen a lot of caterpillars in Madison Square Park lately, although I have seen a fair number of house sparrows.

Chef Lynn, also to use his word, liberated many other European bird species into New York, including bull finches and sky larks and nightingales, all of which died.

But on March 6th 18 90 he released a flock of some 60 common starlings into Central Park in New York City, and in doing so sparked a magnificent disaster.

Now here in North America, we call the common starling the European starling, in much the same way that the French called syphilis the Italian disease, and the Italians called it the French disease.

There, American population has grown from shuffle in 60 birds to somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 million.

In fact, there are now more European starlings in the Americas than there are in Europe.

They form these epic flocks, called murmur rations that are truly beautiful but also hugely destructive, Like if you've ever had a memorization of starlings in your backyard and I have you'll know that they produce an astonishing amount of poop.

Also the crowd out native species and cause about a $1,000,000,000 a year in damages to the United States, mostly in the form of crop destruction.

Plus, they make a lot of noise.

Wikipedia describes the starlings call as a kn musical, but varied, which, incidentally, is I'm going to describe my singing voice.

From now on, there's a hilarious bit from a 19+06 burning book that says of the Starling.

From the bird lovers point of view, the starling is a decided acquisition to the bird life of our cities, where it's long drawn.

Cheery whistle is in welcome contrast to the noisy chatter of house sparrows.

Except one.

Only hard core fans of experimental music would call the starlings whistle cheery and to the reason we have to listen to the chattering of house sparrows is because we introduced them to America, right.

But back to chef when his liberations were part of this whole 19th century movement called acclimatization, wherein people would bring foreign flora and fauna to different places to see if they could make human life better.

All right, so this is the part of the video where I tell you the lesson, which is that humans should not play God or mess with nature or whatever, but no, I mean, the weird thing about Thea climate is ists is that in many ways they were responding appropriately to developments in human history.

I mean, if plants and animals hadn't been moved between the Americas and Afro Eurasia in the centuries after the Columbian exchange began in 14 92 there would be no potatoes in Ireland, no cows or horses in the Americas.

And most were recently no pizza because tomatoes are a food from the Americas and wheat is a food from Afro Eurasia.

One of the reasons that fewer people will starve this decade than in any decade in the last several 1000 years is that we've gotten really good at moving plant and animal species around to places where they will thrive.

It's easy to judge Chef Lynn and in some ways fair, because there were American ornithologists at the time who understood the dangers of acclimatization.

But Chef one didn't know the future, and neither do we.

I'm sure we also have bad ideas that seem good now, but I don't know which ideas.

But I do think it's helpful to remember when thinking about what we believe or what we believe.

We know that history is littered with stories of starlings.

Hank, I'll see you on Friday.

P s about Shakespeare.

There's this old story that Chef Lynn introduced the starlings as part of a project to bring every bird mentioned in Shakespeare's plays to the United States.

There doesn't seem to be any contemporary evidence for that story, unfortunately, but if you can find some, you could solve Ah, minor but pervasive historical mystery.