BACK STORY - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 27

FIGURE 2.2 Starlings.
Source: Lydekker (1894-1895: Vol. III: 345).
Agriculture retrospectively characterized as 'the many attempts to add to our bird
fauna the attractive and familiar [and “useful”] song birds of Europe' (Phillips, 1928:
48-49). The report of the 1877 annual meeting of the American Acclimatization
Society, at which the starling release was triumphantly announced, also approvingly
noted more or less successful releases of English skylarks, pheasants, chaffinches,
and blackbirds, and looked forward to the introduction of English titmice and
robins, as well as additional chaffinches, blackbirds, and skylarks—all characterized
as 'birds which were useful to the farmer and contributed to the beauty of the
groves and fields' (Anon, 1877: 2).
The acclimatization project has often been interpreted as a somewhat naïve and
crude expression of the motives that underlay nineteenth-century imperialism—
intellectual and scientific, as well as political and military—more generally. This
understanding is compelling, but not necessarily comprehensive. There is, for one