Eugene Schieffelin

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Eugene Schieffelin (born January 29, 1827 in New York City , † August 15, 1906 in Newport , Rhode Island ) was an American drug manufacturer and chairman of the American Acclimatization Society . He became known for introducing the starlings, which until then had only been native to Eurasia , to the United States in 1890 and 1891 . The starling population in the United States has grown to 200 million over the past 120 years. They are considered pests, causing damage worth $ 800 million annually.

Life

Family tree of Eugene Schieffelin (<top right)

Schieffelin came from a prominent New York family of German descent. He was the seventh son of attorney Henry Hamilton Schieffelin. Together with his brothers, he managed the third generation of the company Schieffelin & Co., which imported and sold pharmaceuticals. Today it imports wine and spirits under the name Schieffelin & Somerset and is one of the longest running companies in the United States. Schieffelin was interested in science, especially birds, but also a theater and literature lover. He was a member of the New York Zoological Society and the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society . After a long illness he died in Newport in 1906. Schieffelin Avenue and Schieffelin Place in the Bronx are named after his family .

suspension

From 1877 on, Schieffelin was the chairman and driving force of the American Acclimatization Society. The company, founded in 1871, had the goal of importing animals from Europe to North America and making them at home there. There were several such societies in different cities in the United States, as well as unorganized releases of various species of birds. In the 19th century it was not yet known the dramatic effects of introducing non-native animals into a foreign ecosystem .

On March 6, 1890, Schieffelin released 60 starlings ( Sturnus vulgaris ) imported from England in New York's Central Park . The following year he repeated this with 40 other birds. The first pair nested in the gutter of the American Museum of Natural History . In the first few years the birds did not get beyond Manhattan , but by 1928 they had reached the Mississippi and by 1942 California . In the 1950s there were already 50 million starlings native to the USA.

Starlings are considered to be carriers of diseases such as histoplasmosis , toxoplasmosis and Newcastle disease and a danger to air traffic. Your droppings are corrosive and damage buildings. They have also been blamed for the decline of many native bird species such as the red-throated warbler . According to a study by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in 2003, they actually probably only pushed back the juice tasty . As human-introduced birds, they are not covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and are allowed to be killed. Since the 1940s there have been repeated attempts to contain the population. Between 1964 and 1967 alone, 9 million starlings were poisoned in California. In 2008, the US government killed 1.7 million starlings, more than any other species.

According to a popular belief, Schieffelin's personal motivation was to bring to North America all the bird species mentioned in Shakespeare's works. However, this cannot be conclusively proven. According to other opinions, he wanted to push back the sparrows that had been introduced in various places decades earlier and had already become a nuisance. Schieffelin himself had also released sparrows and financed releases. His attempts to introduce bullfinches , skylarks , nightingales and chaffinches , however, failed.

The American poet William Cullen Bryant admired Schieffelin's commitment and wrote the poem The Old-World Sparrow after an evening together in 1858, during which Schieffelin let sparrows fly in his backyard.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Shock And Caw: Pesky Starlings Sill Overwhelm , September 7, 2009, AP
  2. ↑ Schieffelin family papers 1756-1907 New York Public Library Archives & Manuscripts. "The Schieffelin (or Scheuffelin) family, a branch of which located in Geneva in the 16th century, has been traced as far back as the 13th century to Nordlingen , Germany."
  3. ↑ Kim Todd: Tinkering with Eden: A Natural History of Exotics in America. WW Norton & Company, January 2001.
personal data
SURNAME Schieffelin, Eugene
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American drug manufacturer and Chairman of the American Acclimatization Society
DATE OF BIRTH January 29, 1827
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH August 15, 1906
Place of death Newport , Rhode Island