Animals: Starling Plague

A disagreeable bird is the starling. Small, dark, impudent and noisy, its only commendable trait is a fondness for potato bugs. Most dismaying is its inexhaustible enthusiasm for reproduction. Vegetarian more often than insectivorous, starlings strip cherry trees, peck at strawberries, punch holes in lettuce leaves. Their voices are as rough as crows; they fight constantly among themselves. A nuisance already in many a U. S. town, starlings had by last week become a pest in the national capital. Washington citizens wrote letters to the newspapers. It seemed only a matter...

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