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Where starlings are concerned, I thought my heart was a stone.
Starlings descend in great flocks on orchards and farms, decimating crops and dining on feed meant for livestock. In the air, they can bring down airplanes. Their excrement fouls city streets and walkways. And that’s just the nuisance they cause to people. European starlings also outcompete native birds for roosts and nest holes. What is there to love about a bird whose presence causes so many problems? A bird who doesn’t even belong here?
And yet, despite my deep environmental convictions, I have somehow fallen in love with starlings.
I love the gorgeous starry plumage that emerges after they molt. I love the way they can mimic nearly anything, including an elaborate array of construction noises that they have learned in this neighborhood of unceasing construction. I especially love the way they gather in great swooping, looping wintertime flocks, turning the sky into an endless blue stage for their endlessly inventive performances.
As the discourse around nonnative plants and animals grows increasingly strident, I’ve been thinking a lot about the starling-softened stone that was once my heart.
In late March, a New York chapter of Wild Ones, a national nonprofit that advocates for native plants and natural landscapes, posted an explanation for why planting spicebush is better than planting forsythia. Like forsythia, spicebush adds a pop of yellow color to the early spring garden. Like forsythia, spicebush can create a natural screen for backyard privacy. But unlike forsythia, which is both nonnative and sterile, spicebush flowers feed pollinators in springtime. Its leaves feed spicebush-swallowtail caterpillars in summer. Its berries feed a host of songbirds in fall.
One of these plants can restore a garden to its original purpose as a biodiverse ecosystem. The other simply offers a brief display of yellow flowers.
These are incontrovertible facts. Native creatures evolved to recognize native plants as food and habitat. At a time when insect populations are plummeting (in part because of the ubiquity of nonnative plants) and two-thirds of North American birds are at risk of extinction, there is no good reason to plant a flower that offers nothing to the wild world.
But that fact didn’t stop the pro-forsythia contingent from flying into an online rage at the very idea that someone was coming for the flower they learned to love at Granny’s knee. (I won’t link to these posts because I don’t want to add fuel to the conflagration.) In a comment on one post, someone called native-plant advocates “plant racists.”
There was nothing preachy about the Wild Ones post, which after all was aimed at native-plant enthusiasts anyway, but it’s true that environmentalists can sometimes take on a give-no-quarter tone. Sometimes they advocate for a slash-and-burn approach, using literal fire or literal poison to kill off any plant that doesn’t have the right provenance. Sometimes they call for killing introduced birds by any method that works. I can see how unpleasantly similar all this sounds to the dangerous nativist impulses in our culture.
But human beings, whatever their race, belong to the same species. Depending on how you look at it, either all human beings are native to a particular ecosystem or none of us are. Plant and animal species, on the other hand, evolved for a particular landscape — a landscape that in turn evolved to accommodate their presence. Crucial habitat is lost when introduced plants crowd out the native ones that sustain indigenous wildlife.
Despite the scolding tone that native-plant advocates can sometimes take, they are making an irrefutable point. The earth is teetering near a tipping point of no return. In the context of environmental apocalypse, there is no time — and no square inch of garden space — to waste. Every Cassandra in human history has felt this way: desperate to make others see the truth before the towers are on fire.
I am one of those Cassandras. I wrote a whole book about how we can learn to be better neighbors to the wild creatures who share our ecosystems.
But I am also learning how much more complicated this question of who belongs and who does not can sometimes be. Burmese pythons are incontestably devastating the Everglades. But starlings don’t appear to have nearly the negative impact on native cavity-nesting birds that they were long presumed to have. And as the climate changes, we are seeing that it is also changing where specific plants and animals can thrive. Through seed dispersal, introduced creatures can end up being what allows native plants to survive climate change.
Eradicating all the problematic plants that Americans have introduced into their landscapes — not to mention 85 million starlings — is just never going to happen. My husband and I have been rewilding our half-acre lot with increasing urgency for the past 29 years, with only limited success. To return this tiny ecosystem to its pristine origins without using fire or poison would require a level of backbreaking work that neither of us has the back for, and I’m not sure I would risk it anyway. To smother everything in pursuit of a pure yard would mean also smothering the spring beauties and the spring beauty mining bees.
I’m certainly not arguing that what we plant in our gardens doesn’t ultimately matter. It matters very much, and I always want to be on the side of helping rather than harming. Though I have at times been misled by an inaccurate nursery tag, I would never introduce a nonnative plant on purpose. I try to control invasive vegetation, and I will keep on trying, but there is only so much I can realistically do.
Besides, where they are welcomed, wild creatures can find a way to make use of nearly everything. Even plants that feed nobody can serve as a shelter from the cold, or as a nesting site, or as a place to hide from predators. If there’s a plant already in this yard that is doing no harm, I try not to worry about it too much.
Forsythia, for example, is not on any invasive species lists. Since I’ve been honest about my love for starlings, I’ll admit that I love our stand of forsythia, too. My mother started it from a cutting. She planted it here soon after we moved into this house. I had just survived a devastating late miscarriage, and she thought its bright color might cheer me up.
I treasure the native plants that my husband and I have lovingly added to this yard, but I belong to a species that treasures loving memories, too, and I can’t help loving that useless spray of yellow flowers at the end of every fragile gray winter. It reminds me of my beautiful mother, who wanted to save me from my own grief and thought to do it the only way she knew how: by planting flowers.
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