100 birds were released 100 years ago, but now the United States is losing $1 billion a year. What is even more unexpected is that when these 100 birds were just released, they were once called the heroes of the United States.
The great English literary master Shakespeare had a special hobby when creating plays, and he liked to use birds to express his emotions to increase the interest of the play. In his works, there have been more than 60 species of birds such as owls, nightingales, larks, starlings, etc., many of which are familiar to everyone, except for the starling, which may not even know how to pronounce its name (liáng niǎo).
However, although the starling is not amazing and the reputation is not loud, it has plagued the United States for more than 100 years, causing the United States to lose more than $1 billion a year! Until now, the United States has no way to starling. But the funniest thing is that the original habitat of the starling is the European continent, and the reason why it can go to the United States on the American continent is that the Americans themselves introduced it.
However, how did the starling, which was praised by Americans as a "hero of eliminating harm" at the beginning of its introduction, become a pest bird hated by Americans?
In 1890, the United States had been plagued by pests for many years, and grain production was reduced every year, and farmers were complaining bitterly. If a fatal food problem is encountered at the peak of development, it will inevitably delay major events. The United States had to look around for a way, when Schifferin, a member of the American Domestication Association from Germany, came up with an idea: to introduce to the United States a European bird, the starling, which not only looked beautiful, but also had the ability to eliminate pests.
When the U.S. government heard that there was such a good idea, it commissioned Schifferin to import 60 starlings from Europe. Schifferin traveled to Europe as he was asked, and the reason he gave the United States the idea of introducing starlings was because he himself was fascinated by Shakespeare's plays, especially starlings, and had an unusual fondness for them. But after coming to the United States, there was not a single starling in the sky. In order to satisfy his own selfish desires, Schifferin came up with a plan to kill two birds with one stone.
In 1890, Schilling released 60 starlings in the american sky, but in winter, there was still not a single one in the sky. Thinking that they did not survive, they imported 40 from Europe the following year and put them in the sky of the United States. There were 100 starlings from Europe to the United States.
The next year, when the crops were harvested in the United States, I unexpectedly found that the grain production had increased greatly compared with the past, and felt that the role of the starling was too great, and they called it "the hero of eliminating harm"! However, this happiness did not last long, and it was also because of the arrival of the starlings that the United States experienced an unprecedented death disaster!
Starlings are amazingly capable of reproduction because they are species introduced from the outside, have few natural enemies, and are omnivorous birds themselves, seeing what to eat. The reason for increasing food production in previous years is that the number of starlings is not very large, and the pests on crops are enough to fill their stomachs. But with the passage of time, the number of starlings has increased, and it has become uncontrollable, sometimes because the social animal starlings fly from the sky, the sky is a black pressure, more exaggerated than the dark clouds.
According to statistics, in 2004, the number of starlings in the world was about 310 million, compared with 200 million in the United States.
After the number of starlings increases, not only are the pests on the crops not enough to eat, but even the mature crops are not enough to meet the needs of the starlings. Although American farmers have done a lot of protection measures or used methods to drive away starlings, crops have lost an average of 17% of their crops in a year, so it is better to let pests and scourge!
According to American farmers, every winter, starlings come to eat cattle and sheep feed after not eating, and almost every 1,000 starlings can eat $84 of cattle feed. Add in the crops you eat, and over the course of a year, starlings alone can cause $1 billion in losses to U.S. agriculture!
However, the threat of starlings is not limited to agriculture.
Starlings have a strong ability to imitate their sounds, and they are also gregarious birds, and if the sound of one starling is not enough to cause noise, then thousands of starlings make a sound in unison, and this noise pollution is much stronger than that of large factories.
Immediately after, the starling droppings are strongly corrosive, and most birds are "flying and pulling", and whenever the starlings fly from the sky, the steel products in that place will definitely be corroded, and the paint of the body will also fade. Moreover, there are unknown viruses in the droppings of starlings, and once they fall on humans and animals, they may transmit the virus.
In 1960, an American Airlines plane had just taken off from the airport and fell into the water, breaking into the water at an altitude of 60 meters, and the fuselage was broken into two pieces, killing 62 people. The reason for this was the crash caused by a flock of 20,000 starlings crashing into the plane on takeoff.
Today, the U.S. government has adopted a variety of management methods such as shooting and trapping starlings, but the base of starlings is too large and has little effect.
Unexpectedly, the starlings, which were introduced to solve the pests, have become the biggest "pest" in the United States today. #椋鸟 #
