OH, HOW DECEMBER FASHIONS
Experimental / Progressive / Folk
bushwick~you are not your neighborhood
The following is an excerpt from Elizabeth's Meister's ongoing BQE travelogue:
More than three centuries ago, the area of Red Hook now severed by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway used to host a series of tidal estuaries and marshes. The air was thick with now-lost birds like Eskimo curlews and passenger pigeons, and muskrats patrolled where cars now creep down the Atlantic Avenue exit. But by the mid-nineteenth century, industrious Americans had dispensed with the wetlands, dumping old sailing ships and excavated dirt into the marshy depressions, decapitating ancient hills and leveling the land in favor of city blocks and cobbled streets.
With muskrats and birds on the run, the land forever altered, a plague of caterpillars, tent worms, and the like began devouring the trees. In the process of “civilizing†their adopted homeland, early Brooklynites had thrown nature horribly out of balance.
Desperate for a solution, Brooklyn turned to the motherland. So it was that in 1850, a group of residents released eight pairs of English House Sparrows in Brooklyn. They knew that back in Merrie England, their beloved sparrows did the trick on the caterpillars and other garden pests. Unfortunately for the new Brooklynites, the first batch of immigrant sparrows turned belly up. Not to surrender, Nicholas Pike of the Brooklyn Institute sailed across the ocean to fetch 100 more, direct from Liverpool. In 1851, half immediately took wing in Brooklyn, and the other 50 lucky immigrants were assigned a private caretaker and bred in the tower at Green-Wood Cemetery.
They flourished.
One hundred fifty-seven years later, skyward of a stalled Gowanus-bound lane, a particularly observant BQE driver might notice an untidy nest of twigs and shredded garbage bags squashed into the end of the support for the traffic light at the corner of Hicks and Kane. For here, where no other bird could live (not even a pigeon!), four miniscule fresh-born House Sparrows are pecking their way into a steamy afternoon. They join 150 million other House Sparrows, who over the last century-and-a-half have proven a lot less interested in caterpillars than they are in eating farmers’ grain, “recycling†household rubbish, defecating on front stoops, and picking off the eggs of bluebirds, chickadees, and other more delicate, unsuspecting natives. In fact, look again and you might see, triumphant, the new mother pacing the blacktop in her righteous, defiantly giddy march, pecking at forgotten cheese curls and half-eaten Nathan’s hot dogs, haute cuisine for her eager children.
Homesick Englishmen probably didn’t count on the fact that the House Sparrow might act as a sort of Avian Death Squad of a different sort, bringing along a few Old World friends of its own, namely bedbugs, lice, and an impressive array of germs and bacteria, including tuberculosis. House Sparrows are one of only three songbirds not protected by the Federal Government (the others: European Starlings and Rock Doves), and Americans have spent decades trying to get rid of them, including a brief and nauseating period in the 1870s when sparrow fricassee was all the rage. But the immigrant sparrow, the Great American, has survived, even flourished, where lesser birds have gone extinct. As we pave our roads and drive our SUVs in the name of progress, celebrate the masked one who thrives on the discarded debris of city projects and urban roadways—the House Sparrow, official Bird of the BQE!
