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Between 1890 and 1891, a wealthy New Yorker named Eugene Schieffelin released dozens of starlings into Central Park as part of his campaign to introduce animals that were ‘aesthetically and practically valuable’ to the US. It was a romantic and well-intentioned undertaking – an endeavour to bring all of the birds mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare to the country. Only the European starlings survived, but the results were spectacular beyond Schieffelin’s wildest imagination – and utterly disastrous. Within 100 years, the starling population was more than 100 million, with the migratory birds wreaking havoc on farms and native species across the country, and forever reshaping the continent’s sky. A meditation on the starling’s strange North American story, the directors Jessica Bardsley and Penny Lane’s lyrical short documentary The Commoners traces an idiosyncratic history of ecology, linguistics and urbanism, one in which the birds pursue their own form of manifest destiny.
Directors: Jessica Bardsley and Penny Lane
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Biology
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6 minutes
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Biology
Flicker through the eclectic beauty and biological diversity of 2,400 leaves
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Animals and humans
What happened when one woman raised an abandoned squirrel as her own
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Art
The female Abstract Expressionists of New York shook the world of art
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Metaphysics
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The future
What’s the healthiest way to handle a creeping feeling that the world is ending?
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Archaeology
From Roman pots to glass eyes, the shore of the river Thames teems with surprises
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Psychiatry and psychotherapy
Pondering the peculiar one-sided intimacy of the client-therapist relationship
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History of science
Bat-people on the Moon – what a famed 1835 hoax reveals about misinformation today
8 minutes