Mozart's Starling

Starlings arrived in North America through one of history's more misguided acts of enthusiasm. In the early 1890s, a group in New York — often associated with a man named Eugene Schieffelin — released several dozen European starlings in Central Park, part of a fashion for importing the birds mentioned in Shakespeare. From that small founding population the species spread across the continent, and today they number in the hundreds of millions. They compete with native birds for nesting cavities, foul buildings, and swarm crops. To a working naturalist, the starling is a problem with feathers.

Haupt knew all this intimately, which is what makes her turn so honest. When she decided to raise one, she was crossing a line drawn by her own training. She went out to a barn where starlings were being culled, took a nestling that would otherwise have died, and brought the pink, blind, squawking thing home in a berry basket. She fed it a slurry every forty minutes. She let it imprint on her family. And she felt, the whole time, the low guilt of a specialist consorting with the enemy.

Much of the book is spent close to Carmen, watching. Starlings, Haupt learns and shows, are extraordinary vocal learners. Their syrinx — the avian voice box — is built to produce two independent streams of sound at once, which is why their song can seem to fold in on itself, one melody running under another. In the wild they sing in loose flocks, and their murmurations, those vast shape-shifting clouds at dusk, are coordinated by simple rules each bird follows relative to its nearest neighbors. Watching a murmuration, she writes, is watching improvisation made visible.

Carmen's talents were smaller and stranger. She mimicked the microwave beep so precisely the family kept walking to the kitchen. She learned phrases and deployed them, if not with meaning, then with something like timing. She stole shiny objects and hid them. She recognized individual people and greeted them differently. None of this is anthropomorphic wishful thinking — corvids and parrots and starlings are among the animals whose cognition genuinely troubles the old, tidy line between human and beast.

Step back from the two birds and a larger claim comes into focus, one Haupt builds without ever stating it as a thesis. We tend to imagine creative genius as something sealed and solitary — the composer alone at the keyboard, drawing music out of some private wellspring. Mozart's starling is a small dent in that picture. Here was one of history's supreme creators sharing his working rooms, for years, with a chattering animal that improvised on his themes, and grieving it when it died. The muse, in this telling, had feathers and stole food off the table.

Her point is not that the starling made Mozart's music; that would be absurd, and she doesn't say it. It is that making things happens inside relationships and surroundings, not in a vacuum. The world a person lives among — its noises, its companions, the creatures that share the house — feeds the imagination whether or not the person notices. Mozart's daily life included a bird whose entire being was devoted to listening and remixing. It is not nothing that he chose to keep it, buried it with ceremony, and wrote it a poem.

When Carmen died, after roughly two years, Haupt buried her in the garden and felt the disproportion of the grief the way Mozart must have — more than a small bird should be able to summon. The expense book that started everything is still there, thirty-four kreuzer and a few bars of music and the word schön, evidence that a working genius stopped one May afternoon to write down a bird's rough draft of his own tune and found it beautiful. She had set out to explain that anecdote and ended up living her way into it instead.