What is your favorite rose?

pomperola. It blooms with many petals.

What fascinates you about roses?

Your scent. I grow only scented roses: English varieties prior to the year 1871.

What happened in 1871?

Unscented varieties were grafted.

Do those rose bushes have names?

Orient express and others so evocative. I have not bought the Julio Iglesias variety.

Hey.

Yes, the so-called Kiss me, Kate, rosal named after the musical inspired by William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.

You’ve novelized about him now…

Rather about Eugene Schieffelin, a devoted reader of William Shakespeare who acclimatized birds in New York in 1890.

Acclimatized birds, you say?

Yes, he brought thirty pairs of starlings from England and released them in Central Park: that’s where the 300 million starlings of the American continent descend today.

How is this bird, the starling?

Tiny, elegant, with black feathers with iridescent sheen, omnivorous and gregarious: it flies in flocks drawing beautiful undulations in the twilight sky.

And what does Shakespeare have to do with it?

Shakespeare, in Henry IV, speaks of teaching a starling to repeat “Mortimer”, the King’s enemy, to mortify him.

Can starlings talk?

They can reproduce some words.

Why did Schieffelin notice them?

Anything English held distinction for New Yorkers: he read Shakespeare.

AND?

He noticed all the species of birds that appear in Shakespeare’s works.

How many species of birds come out?

The starling and 53 other species of English birds: owl, cormorant, cardinal, nightingale, lark… And a lot of raven.

And Schieffelin took note?

The New York World reported the day he released English starlings in Central Park, where Schieffelin was a neighbor.

He brought an English detail to New York…

He chaired the American Acclimatization Society: they acclimatized European species in America, it was their well-intentioned way of improving the new world.

And they improved it?

That perception has been reversed and today we speak of “invasive species”: starlings are now seen as a plague.

And are they really?

A Lokheed plane went down in 1960, the largest air accident in the United States, in which 62 people died. And the starlings were blamed. But many starlings died there too, poor thing!

Yeah, yeah, but…

I see there ornithoxenophobia, a form of racism: it is called a “foreign bird”, a foreign invasion, a plague! The poor starling has a very bad press: I don’t like that!

How do you see the starling?

While documenting myself, I empathized with all the birds and even bought myself binoculars, the door to ornithology.

Have you had an instructor?

The ornithologist Jordi Sargatal, a true sage. And now my daughter is becoming fond of it too: “Look, Mom, a black redstart, a tit, a jay…”.

Is the starling your favorite bird today?

Yes, and also the cardinal, with its very showy red plumage. And while he was writing, a hoopoe came to my balcony every morning: he watched me. I finished the novel… and it flew.

What else have you learned by researching Shakespeare’s birds?

That the name Vanessa was invented by Shakespeare! It tells How Shakespeare Changed Everything, by Stephen Marche.

And what else do you know about Eugene Schieffelin?

He was a member of a very wealthy Jewish New York family thanks to the pharmaceutical trade. He lived on a farm at the time in the countryside… where Columbia University is today. He passed away in 1906.

What was your New York like?

Eugene Schieffelin’s grandfather, Jacob, owned half of Manhattan and laid out its grid, and founded a church… His ancestor Jacob became the richest man in all of New York City.

One of the great New York personalities of the 19th century, therefore.

Like Nellie Bly, a courageous journalist for the New York World: she was capable of pretending to be crazy to write about an insane asylum or going around the world in 72 days just to beat Jules Verne’s Fogg character.

Another character worthy of a novel…

Like Claudia, a Catalan girl who had a wish: to marry a Sevillian. And she courted one, Antonio, by letter. And they married! They are Claudia and Antonio: my parents. I’ll also novelize that one day. My father, by the way, liked to raise canaries…