As for the starling, I thought my heart was of stone.
Starlings descend on orchards and farms in droves, devouring crops and feeding on livestock feed. You can also shoot down planes in the air. Their excrement pollutes city streets and sidewalks. And that’s just the nuisance they cause people. European starlings also compete with native birds for roosting and nesting sites. What is there to love about a bird whose existence causes so many problems? A bird that doesn’t belong here?
Yet, despite my deep environmental beliefs, I somehow fell in love with starlings.
I love the gorgeous starry feathers that appear after molting. I love how they can imitate just about anything, including an elaborate series of construction noises learned in this area of ​​constant construction. I especially love how, during the winter months, they form large flocks that swoop and loop, turning the sky into an endless blue stage for endless inventive performances.
As the discourse around exotic plants and animals becomes more intense, I have often thought about the starling-softened stone that was once so central to my heart.
In late March, the New York chapter of Wild Ones, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for native plants and natural landscapes, posted an explanation of why planting spicebush is better than planting forsythia. Like forsythia, spicebush adds a pop of yellow to an early spring garden. Like forsythia, spice bushes can create a natural screen for backyard privacy. But unlike forsythia, which is invasive and sterile, spicebush flowers provide food for pollinators in the spring. In summer, its leaves feed caterpillars of spicebush and swallowtail butterflies. In the fall, the fruit is food for many songbirds.
With one of these plants, you can return your garden to its original purpose as a biodiverse ecosystem. The other simply displays yellow flowers for a short period of time.
These are indisputable facts. Native organisms have evolved to recognize native plants as food and habitat. At a time when insect populations have plummeted (due in part to the spread of invasive plants) and two-thirds of North America’s bird species are at risk of extinction, a good reason to plant flowers that offer nothing to the wild world. there is no.
But this fact doesn’t stop forsythia supporters from raging online at the very idea that someone is coming to take back the flower they grew to love in their grandmother’s lap. There wasn’t. (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 supporters “plant racists.”
While Wild Ones’ post was not preachy at all and was, after all, aimed at native plant lovers, it’s true that environmentalists can sometimes be compromising. Sometimes they advocate a slash-and-burn approach, using literal fire or literal poison to kill plants that don’t have the right provenance. Sometimes they call for effective methods to kill exotic birds. All of this proves to be uncomfortably similar to the dangerous xenophobic impulses in our culture.
However, humans belong to the same species, regardless of race.Depending on how you look at it, either all Either humans are unique to a particular ecosystem, or no one is. On the other hand, plant and animal species evolved in a way that landscapes evolved to adapt to specific landscapes, i.e., the presence of plants and animals. Critical habitat is lost when invasive plants displace native plants that support native wildlife.
Native plant advocates sometimes take a scolding tone, but they make irrefutable claims. The Earth is teetering close to a tipping point of no return. In the context of the environmental apocalypse, there is no time to waste and neither can garden space. Every Cassandra in human history has felt this way. Desperate to get others to see the truth before the tower burns.
I am one of those Cassandras. I wrote an entire book about how we can learn to be better neighbors to the wildlife we ​​share our ecosystems with.
But I’m also learning how complicated this question of who belongs and who doesn’t can sometimes be. Burmese pythons are undeniably devastating the Everglades. But starlings don’t seem to be having a negative impact on native cavity-nesting birds, as was long thought. And as the climate changes, we find that the places where certain plants and animals can thrive are also changing. Through seed dispersal, introduced organisms may eventually help native plants survive climate change.
It will never be possible to eradicate all the problematic plants Americans have introduced into the landscape, let alone the 85 million starlings. Her husband and I have been rewilding the half-acre property with increasing urgency for the past 29 years, with limited success. In order to restore this small ecosystem to its original state without using fire or poison, we will have to do a level of painstaking work that no one else can do, but I am not willing to take that risk anyway. I don’t know if it will work or not. Suffocating everything in search of a pure garden means also suffocating the beauty of spring and the bees that mine it.
Of course, I’m not going to argue that what we plant in our gardens doesn’t ultimately matter. I always want to be on the side of helping, not hurting, because that is so important. Although I have been misled by inaccurate breeding tags, I never intentionally introduce exotic plants. I have tried and will continue to try to control the invasive vegetation, but there is only so much I can realistically do.
Additionally, wildlife can find a way to take advantage of almost anything wherever it is welcomed. Even plants that do not feed anyone may serve as a shelter from the cold, a nesting site, or a place to hide from predators. If you already have plants in this garden that won’t cause you any harm, I try not to worry too much.
For example, forsythia is not on any invasive species list. 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 with cuttings. She planted it here shortly after we moved into this house. I had just survived a devastating late miscarriage, so she thought the bright color might cheer me up.
I cherish the native plants that my husband and I have lovingly added to this garden, but they belong to a species that also cherishes the loving memories, scattered around the edges of fragile gray trees. I can’t help but love these useless yellow flowers. winter. It reminds me of my beautiful mother. My mother wanted to save me from her sadness and she thought of planting flowers as the only way.
