On Thursday afternoon, on my way back from the periodontist, I stopped in East Dennis for a cup of coffee. The intersection there, at the junction of Route 134 and Route 6A, is a place I have frequented hundreds of times over the years. It was a cool, crisp November day, and as I stood there, warming my hands with the coffee, I saw a flock of several hundred, perhaps 1000 starlings, wheeling above the intersection, perching on the telephone lines, then taking off again. It was the same flock of birds that have haunted this intersection each fall over the decades, swarming and wheeling in that loosely-cohesive fashion they have. This flock of starlings always seems to me the very embodiment of half-formed indecisive, ever-shifting thoughts or spirits. And the birds are, in fact, dispossessed creatures.
In 1890 Eugene Schieffelin, a New York businessman fanatically devoted to the works of Shakespeare, came up with the ill-conceived notion of transplanting every bird mentioned in the Bard’s plays to Central Park. European starlings are mentioned in Henry IV, Part One, and since their introduction they have multiplied to become one of the most common bird species in North America. Having been dispossessed of their native European migratory pathways, they seem doomed to wander aimlessly in this New World, driven to purposeless movement generation after generation, condemned to move endlessly and land nowhere, or only momentarily, and then only to realize that it is, once again, the wrong place.
I have contemplated these starlings here in East Dennis repeatedly over the years. They seem to provide me with an inexhaustible storehouse or wellspring of metaphor. Perhaps this is in part because, knowing their history, they seem so much like lost souls in search of an identity for themselves. Sometimes they appear as dark popcorn strung on dark strings. At other times they seem to perch like winged black notes on musical staffs formed by the telephone lines. At still other times they have reminded me of a black-winged abacus strung on the wires, waiting for me to sling them all to one side or the other up against a pole, as if tabulating evidence for some unanswerable question.
At one point they flew in front of a gray, gilt-edged cloud and seemed for a moment to assume the exact shape of it, to be congruent with it, as if to say, we will be a cloud now, if only for a few seconds. Then they flew through the tiers of power and telephone lines like iron filings flung through magnetic wires. Most of the birds attached themselves to the wires. The ones that didn’t seemed to be torn apart by this invisible field of attraction into two ragged parts. One veered back and joined the others on the wires. The other group dove into a red cedar tree on the other side of the road, where they set up a loud, animated, electric squabbling, like black ornaments on a Christmas tree.
The birds on the wires, however, remained relatively quiet. They assumed an almost comical individuality, lined up like birds in a shooting gallery or like dark suspects in some avian police lineup. They seemed suddenly aware of their neighbors, slightly disconcerted by having nothing particular to say to them. They appeared to behave in a rather self-conscious manner, as if saying, “I think I’ll preen now,” or, “What are these fellows across the street doing?” So the starlings perched there on the wires, marking time, waiting to be reassembled into the comforting, unconscious mass of the undivided group.
