Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
their empire, at one point releasing European hedgehogs in Martinique to eat snakes. Rabbits introduced
to one corner of Chile smartly hopped across the Andes onto the Argentine pampas.
But the acclimatization movement was at its wildest in the United States. As early as 1846, the Nat-
ural History Society of America was releasing European songbirds into the skies above New York City.
It rustled up fifty-eight pairs of English house sparrows to combat a plague of worms in Green-Wood
Cemetery in Brooklyn. Chapters were at work from Massachusetts to Oregon, California, and Hawaii.
A country club in San Francisco was founded to bring brown trout from Europe to the state's streams. In
Cincinnati, after housing birds in a mansion for a few weeks, the society released robins, wagtails, sky-
larks, nightingales, corncrakes, blackbirds, dippers, and tits. Historian of the acclimatization movement
Christopher Lever notes that most “were never seen again.”
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In New York City, the high priest of the movement was Bronx pharmacist Eugene Schiefflin. So-
metime in the 1870s he conceived the idea of bringing to New York every European bird mentioned in
the works of William Shakespeare, some six hundred in all. Skylarks and finches, robins and blackbirds,
sparrows and titmice—all had their moment in the New World thanks to the eccentric Schiefflin.
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Most
failed to survive for long, but Schiefflin struck it lucky when in 1890 and 1891 he released forty pairs of
European starlings (
Sturnus vulgaris
) in Central Park. His inspiration was a brief reference to the bird in
an interchange between Hotspur and the Earl of Worcester in
Henry IV, Part 1
.
Three years later, the first nests were spotted, under the eaves of the American Museum of Natural
History adjacent to the park. By the following year, they were on Long Island, and from then on there
was no stopping them. Starlings had taken a liking to their new home. Today the starling is North Amer-
ica's most numerous bird, with an estimated two hundred million on the wing. There are almost as many
as humans, and most are descended from the Central Park releases. Their impact on native bluebirds,
woodpeckers, and others that they pushed from suitable nesting sites is still debated. Meanwhile, the
custodians of Central Park followed up with a garden devoted to plants mentioned by Shakespeare. It
lives on, and now there are others scattered across the United States and elsewhere, an echo of the time
when “acclimatization” was all the rage.
Another Victorian whim that took off around the world was a big-leafed aquatic weed, whose brilliant
purple and violet flowers and dark leathery leaves floated prettily across the backwaters of the Amazon
and its tributaries: the water hyacinth (
Eichornia crassipes
). It delighted local rubber barons at the height
of the rubber boom there in the 1880s. These nineteenth-century equivalents of hedge-fund bosses and
dot-com billionaires took to growing it in the ponds of their mansions in the Peruvian jungle city of
Iquitos. From there, someone shipped some out of the Amazon. Perhaps it was the notorious Julio César
Arana, who ran chain gangs harvesting the sap of rubber trees across an area the size of Belgium and also
had a home at Biarritz in the south of France. The truth is murky, but before long the pretty weed was
the fashionable foliage in ornamental ponds across the imperial globe. It was among the many plants on
display in 1884 at the New Orleans Cotton Exposition, and by 1896 it had escaped in sufficient quantit-
ies to become a navigational hazard in the waterways of Florida.
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Water hyacinth is “one of the fastest growing and most aggressive plants on Earth,” according to
Paul Woomer, an agricultural scientist formerly at the University of Nairobi who has written widely on
its progress. It usually spreads by sending out short runner stems that produce daughter plants, but it also
produces seeds that can survive in soils or lake sediments for up to fifteen years. Theoretically, a single
plant can produce 140 million offspring in a year. An “infestation” typically doubles in size within a
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