It has long been said that homesick settlers introduced birds into New Zealand for purely sentimental reasons. Sentimentality was indeed a factor with such birds as the skylark but the main reason for their introduction was far more practical.
With the wholesale destruction of the bush to make farmed land, the ecology was so disrupted that the country was overwhelmed by plagues of insects which, to use the words in an old agricultural bulletin, “crawled over the land in vast hordes. The gathering of the caterpillars was a sight that caused consternation to agriculturists. They came not in regiments and battalions but in mighty armies, devouring crops as they passed along and leaving fields as bare as if seed had not been sown”.
One of the few weapons the farmers had was to drive flocks of sheep over the armies of caterpillars. “In places large ditches were dug to stop the creatures progress. Some of the native birds performed good service by eating the insects. Prominent among these were gulls, terns, kingfishers, oystercatchers, native larks, white–eyes, fantails, bellbirds and grey warblers. At first the kingfishers seemed to increase rapidly with agriculture and were regarded for a time as the agriculturists’ best friends. The native birds, however, would not dwell with men, and when the bush was destroyed in the vicinity of settlement they retreated further back, and only visited the insect laden fields occasionally.”
It was for this reason that the settlers turned their attention to the insect eating birds. The issue was considered carefully. The introduced birds would have to possess three qualifications: they would have to be able to eat both insects and seeds, otherwise they would not survive the winters; they must be non-migratory, otherwise the time and money spent on their acclimatization would be wasted; and they must be prolific breeders, so that they should multiply and soon overcome insect pests.
Starlings fulfilled the criteria admirably and while other birds lost their popularity with farmers, especially those with a liking for fruit and seeds, the starling has retained its popularity to this day, unlike in other parts of the world.
