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The Bird That Lives in St. Louis — and Pretty Much Only St. Louis | St. Louis

Published

9 months ago

January 10, 2024

Natural Bridge

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click to enlarge The Eurasian Tree Sparrow is our bird.

For most of my life, I had just assumed that every little brown bird was the same kind of bird.

Even when they were in my direct line of sight, my brain barely registered that they were even there. No one else seemed to really notice them either. They didn’t have a baseball team named after them like a cardinal. They weren’t draped in the American flag on the back of some scary dude’s pickup truck like a bald eagle. They were just those boring, stupid brown trash birds that sometimes got a little too close on restaurant patios while I tried to get drunk and eat French fries.

But then over the past few years I got waaaaaay into birding (normies refer to it as birdwatching) and learned that one of these brown birds, the Eurasian Tree Sparrow, wasn’t actually that boring at all.

It was still the color of dirt so, yes, unspectacular in that regard, but interesting in that it could only be found in one major city on the entire continent of North America, and that city happened to be St. Louis, Missouri.

I had made this discovery at a time when I became so passionate about birding that friends and family began to worry that my brain was cracked.

“What’s with the binoculars?” was a question asked in hushed tones more than once during the two-year span that I was frequently seen in public with a pair around my neck. I had been so consumed by the newfound thrill of identifying a previously unseen bird that I was bringing them with me everywhere, even if I was just going to the grocery store, just in case I saw something flapping around in the parking lot.

The origin of my new hobby was not a complete mental breakdown, but the preference to avoid one. My first son had just been born and the sudden increase of my life’s responsibilities from few to many, combined with a total lack of sleep, was having a major impact on my psyche. At the same time, a global pandemic was really hitting its stride, shattering every delusion I used to have about any control I had over the universe.

And my near-constant phone use was exacerbating the problem. I spent several hours a day doom-scrolling, obsessively checking the news for COVID-19 updates, and sometimes calling my relatives racist on Facebook. Even when I was outside, going for a run around Francis Park, I still somehow found a way to look at my phone, often playing Pokémon GO, a game where you wander around your neighborhood trying to catch shiny Bulbasaurs. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m jealous.

I started to become vaguely aware that I was losing touch with the real world around me, which wasn’t necessarily an uncommon occurrence, but this time I had a baby to look after, and getting trapped in my own head was no longer a luxury I could afford. I needed to find a relaxing way to reconnect with my immediate surroundings.

I landed on birding pretty quickly. Sort of like Pokémon GO, birding was a kind of game in itself, where your high score increased every time you found a new species, and also a puzzle in trying to figure out which species you were even looking at, a task that can be fairly complicated when so many of them closely resemble each other. I also had an inherent vague interest in birds ever since Jurassic Park told me they were basically flying dinosaurs. So I got the Peterson Field Guide to Birds, stopped looking for holiday-themed Pikachus on my phone and started looking for creatures in the real world instead.

My initial objectives were only to identify the flashier, more colorful birds I had never previously known by name, birds that weren’t burned into the public consciousness like robins and blue jays. I also wanted to find birds I had never seen or heard of before due to not paying attention or caring.

I set up a couple of bird feeders in my Southampton backyard and had some early fancy-named successes. There was a Rose-breasted Grosbeak. A couple of Indigo Buntings. Even a White-Tailed Treebeak made a single appearance. And yes, I did make that last bird up.

Due to the limitations of my urban landscape, birds like that grosbeak were about as rare as a face covering in a Bass Pro Shop. Most of the time the feeder was occupied by squirrels or those lame brown birds I mentioned earlier. My initial attempts to even identify those stupid birds were discouraging because they all looked exactly the same. But I reached a point where they were all I had left, and the endorphin rush that was greeting each new identification was starting to become addicting, so I did what every junkie does and made do with what I had.
click to enlarge Left, the House Sparrow. Right, the Eurasian Tree Sparrow.

The first dirt bird I successfully identified was a House Sparrow. This really is the brown bird that you see everywhere. I consulted with my field guide to check its North American range, and the entire map was purple, indicating this bird was at all places at all times, no matter the season.

It turned out to be the most prevalent bird in the world, too, an invasive species from the Middle East that has bullied its way into nearly every continent, running native species out of their homes and nesting in every nook and cranny it can fit into. If we ever colonize the moon or Mars, it’ll find a way to get there, too.

The second brown bird I identified ended up being exponentially more fascinating: the Eurasian Tree Sparrow. I checked my North American field guide assuming I’d found another wide-ranging pest, but it turned out to be something drastically different. Instead of an all-purple map, it was a tiny purple smudge, hovering right over where I lived.

I had learned enough to know that this extremely confined range was bizarre, or even possibly incorrect. Birds are typically spread out over several states, if not countries, so for one to be isolated in a small geographic area that wasn’t an island was a bit unbelievable.

I checked other sources, which all delivered the same result: In all of North America, the only major city that this bird could be found was the one I happened to be living in: St. Louis.

I was pretty gobsmacked. At least, as gobsmacked as one can be over a fucking bird. How did St. Louis have its own? I needed answers, and after all my previous effort to find a hobby that kept me offline, I was right back on the internet, but this time with a purpose.

The Eurasian Tree Sparrow’s St. Louis story started in the 1830s when, as is a recurring theme in history, shit was going down in Germany. The country was engulfed in economic and political turmoil, and one of the more popular solutions to the ongoing problems was just to get the hell out of there. A German by the name of Dr. Gottfried Duden came to the St. Louis area and figured it was the best option for relocation, and enthusiastically argued as much in a very popular book at the time, spurring thousands of other fellow countrymen to follow his lead.

It should be noted that, as Ernst A. Stadler wrote in The German Settlement of St. Louis, a lot of those Germans were pretty pissed off when they got here and discovered that the winters and summers were pretty fucking miserable. Duden himself left after a couple of years and never came back.

Anyway, the German population here began to thrive. So much so that a few decades later there were multiple (!) German language newspapers. One of their owners, Carl Daenzer of Anzeiger Des Westens, decided St. Louis had not been quite Germanized enough, so a decision was made to introduce a variety of invasive avian species into the local ecosystem, just so the German transplants here could see and hear the same birds that they had back in the country they had just escaped from.

On April 25, 1870, roughly 20 Eurasian Tree Sparrows were ceremoniously released in Lafayette Park. There were some other German species that were released that day as well, but they all died.

Only the Eurasian Tree Sparrow had the courage to live in Missouri. With a little bit of luck, and probably some inbreeding, their population and territory began to flourish in the area, much like their human counterparts (minus the inbreeding, one assumes). But after a few years those territorial gains came to a near standstill after a bigger, dumber invasive species started to muscle its way into the area.

“Some story goes that someone wanted to introduce to North America all the birds that Shakespeare ever mentioned in his plays,” says Vincent St. Louis. The biology professor at the University of Alberta studied the Eurasian Tree Sparrow as part of his master thesis and not because (as he assured me) his last name was St. Louis.

One of those Shakespearean birds was the House Sparrow, the first brown bird I successfully identified on my feeder, which was released in New York in the 1850s. It only took a few decades for the House Sparrow to spread across the entire country, overlapping the St. Louis Sparrow (trademark!) in range, making it almost certainly the reason why that tiny purple smudge over the Mississippi hasn’t grown much over the past century.

Yet it is growing, says Bill Rowe, president of the St. Louis Audubon Society, and another expert I spoke to about this topic because I’m a very scholarly and rigorous writer.

“They haven’t been static for 150 years; they have expanded slowly,” Rowe says. “It’s just been in the past 30-plus years that they have been breeding in Iowa.”

On the other side of the planet, it’s a completely different story. The Eurasian Tree Sparrow is widespread over both the continents in its name, and it is crucial to the ecosystem. They are so crucial, in fact, that an attempt to exterminate them in China in the 1950s played a major role in bringing about the deadliest famine in all of human history. At the time, the Chinese government identified the bird as a pest that ate substantial amounts of the country’s grain supply, but what was overlooked was the substantial amounts of crop-eating bugs they also consumed. The lack of sparrows to keep that bug population in check contributed to a disastrous agricultural upheaval, resulting in the deaths of tens of millions of people.

In stark contrast, if the Eurasian Tree Sparrow were run out of America, the worst thing that might happen is that the wild bird seed at Varietees Bird Store would have to be restocked slightly less often. Their range is so limited and inconsequential that most people in the country, even those who live in St. Louis, aren’t even aware that they exist, like expiration dates on temp tags. It’s not entirely known how the bird managed to stick around to begin with, but the leading theory is that it has something to do with their size.

Both St. Louis (the biologist) and Rowe emphasized that the Eurasian Tree Sparrow is a bit smaller than the more aggressive House Sparrow. Both species can make homes out of every possible little hole and crevice available, but the Eurasian Tree Sparrow can shack up in slightly tinier, even more impossible places that the House Sparrow cannot, like, say, a crack in my house fascia that I didn’t know existed, preventing the House Sparrow from running them out of every available nesting site.

click to enlarge DAN ZETTWOCH St. Louis artist Dan Zettwoch is a fan of the Eurasian Tree Sparrow.

As far as anyone knows, no additional Eurasian Tree Sparrows have been released in North America since 1870. Vincent St. Louis’ research supported this theory back in the late 1980s when his genetic studies indicated a fairly shallow gene pool in the local population. That means any Eurasian Tree Sparrow you see in St. Louis is a direct descendant of the original 20 or so birds that were set free in Lafayette Park more than 150 years ago.

So by this point you may be wondering, “How can I go and find this bird for myself, since all the brown birds kind of look the same?” Well, it just so happens this is the easiest of the bunch to spot. Just be warned, it may only take one successful identification before you start down a lifetime of birding, annoyingly choosing vacation spots strictly based on the fauna, and alienating your friends and family by excitedly pointing out a red-shafted Northern Flicker outside of its normal range.

Still here? OK, here goes: If you want to see a Eurasian Tree Sparrow, go to the nearest window and look for the small brown bird with a clear and distinctive black dot on both sides of its face.

Did you see it? Well then congratulations, you’re hooked on birding. But if you’re going to the grocery store, you can definitely leave your binoculars at home.

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Five Fun Facts About Busch Stadium You Didn’t Know

Published

2 months ago

July 30, 2024

Natural Bridge

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When baseball fans roll into St. Louis, Busch Stadium often tops their must-see list. But this iconic ballpark has more hidden gems beyond baseball — and even beyond its souvenir shops and good hotdogs. Here’s a lineup of interesting facts that’ll make you the MVP in Busch Stadium trivia.

From Ballpark to Brewing Brand Deal

A 1900 postcard showing the Oyster House of Tony Faust, founder of the brewing firm | Courtesy Anheuser-Busch.

Busch Stadium has a past that’s more refreshing than a cold beer. Before becoming the shrine of Cardinals baseball, it was a multipurpose park called Sportsman”s Park in 1953. Anheuser-Busch, the brewing giant that owned the Cardinals for a time, purchased the stadium and called it Busch Stadium.

Talk about brewing a partnership with a home run!

Museum for Baseball Maniacs

One can explore unique stadium models, step into the broadcast booth to relive Cardinals’ historic moments and hold authentic bats from team legends in this Museum | Courtesy Cardinals Nation

The St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Fame and Museum is an 8,000-square-foot tribute to baseball’s rich history. Opening on the Cardinals’ 2014 Opening Day, this shrine charts the team’s stories from its 1882 beginnings when it was still called the American Association Browns. Here, you can revel in the team’s 11 World Series Championships and 19 pennants. And if you’re feeling adventurous, watch the game from the museum’s roof—the Hoffmann Brothers Rooftop—complete with a full-service bar and an all-you-can-eat menu. It’s like VIP seating, but with more hot dogs.

Even the Fans Break World Records

Busch Stadium is more than a ballpark; it’s a record-breaking arena.

In one memorable event, Nathan’s Famous set a Guinness World Record for the most selfies taken simultaneously—4,296, to be exact. Just imagine trying to squeeze all those selfies into a single frame!

Not to be outdone, Edward Jones and the Alzheimer’s Association formed the largest human image of a brain on the field in 2018. With 1,202 people, the image was like a giant, multi-colored brain freeze.

1,202 people gathered in centerfield at Busch Stadium to form a multi-coloured brain image | Screenshot from Guinness World Records.

The MLB Park in Your Backyard

Are you an avid Cardinals fan, thinking about living near the stadium? The cost of living in the area might be in your favor.

A 2017 study by Estately.com shows that media prices for homes around Busch Stadium is the fourth least expensive among around 26 major MLB stadiums. When San Francisco Giants fans have to pay up $1,197,000 that year for the same convenience of catching a game at a walking distance, Cardinal fans can snag real estate at only $184,900. If that’s not a walk-off win of a deal, we’re not sure what is.

Big Cleats to Fill as Busch Stadium Eyes Expansion

Those wanting to invest in property near Busch Stadium better get it while it’s still affordable. Rumor has it Busch Stadium could soon expand. That rumor has been going around for three decades since talks to raise public money allegedly started. We’ll believe it when we see it.

According to Cardinals owner Bill DeWitt III, plans are likely to mirror recent projects for the Milwaukee Brewers and Baltimore Orioles, with price tags hovering around $500 to $600 million. But the real investment is still up for debates pending a concrete cost-benefit analysis on the stadium’s surrounding area.

So the next time you kick back with a cold beer and catch a game at Busch Stadium, be in awe of the fact there’s more to the place than what meets the batter’s eye. Pitch these interesting facts at trivia night or to your Hinge date who’s new in town. Who knows – you might just win a home run beer.

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Nashville Police Officer Arrested for Appearing in Adult Video

Published

4 months ago

June 14, 2024

Natural Bridge

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A Nashville police officer, Sean Herman, 33, has been arrested and charged with two counts of felony official misconduct after allegedly appearing in an adult video on OnlyFans while on duty. Herman was fired one day after detectives became aware of the video last month.

The video, titled “Can’t believe he didn’t arrest me,” shows Herman, participating in a mock traffic stop while in uniform, groping a woman’s breasts, and grabbing his genitals through his pants. The officer’s face is not visible, but his cruiser, patrol car, and Metro Nashville Police Department patch on his shoulder are clearly visible.

The Metro Nashville Police Department launched an investigation immediately upon discovering the video. The internal investigation determined Herman to be the officer appearing in the video. He was fired on May 9 and arrested on June 14, with a bond set at $3,000.

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Jane Smiley’s New Novel, Lucky, Draws on Her Charmed St. Louis Childhood

Published

5 months ago

May 22, 2024

Natural Bridge

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Like any good St. Louisan, Jane Smiley has an opinion on the high school question.

“If you ask somebody in St. Louis, ‘Where did you go to high school’ — because each school is so unique, you do get a sense of what their life was like and where they live,” says the John Burroughs graduate. “Where are you from? What do you like? And, you know, the answer is always interesting.”

That’s pretty much what Jodie Rattler, the main character of Smiley’s latest novel, Lucky, thinks.

“School, in St. Louis, is a big question, especially high school,” Rattler muses toward the start of the story. “… My theory about this is not that the person who asks wants to judge you for your socioeconomic position, rather that he or she wants to imagine your neighborhood, since there are so many, and they are all different.”

This parallel thought pattern is even less of a coincidence than the author/subject relationship implies. Lucky, which Alfred A. Knopf published last month, is nominally the story of Jodie, a folk musician gone fairly big who hails from our fair town. But the book is more than just its plot: It’s an ode to St. Louis and an exploration of the life Jane Smiley might have lived — if only a few things were different.

The trail to Lucky started in 2019, when Smiley returned here for her 50th high school reunion and agreed to a local interview. The radio host asked why she’d never set a novel in St. Louis.

“I thought, ‘Boy, why haven’t I done that?'” Smiley remembers. “And so then I thought, ‘Well, maybe I should think about it.’ And I decided since I love music, and St. Louis is a great music town, that I would maybe do an alternative biography of myself if I had been a musician, and of course I would say where she went to [high] school. So that’s what got me started. And the more I got into it, the more I enjoyed it.” click to enlarge DEREK SHAPTON Jane Smiley rocketed to literary stardom after winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for A Thousand Acres. She now has more than 25 books to her name.

The Life Jane Smiley Didn’t Live

Jane Smiley has always felt really lucky.

First, there was her background: She grew up with a “very easygoing and fun family.” Growing up in Webster Groves, she enjoyed wandering through the adjacent neighborhoods and exploring how spaces that were so close together could have such different vibes.

Then there was her career, which kicked into gear when she was 42 with the publication of A Thousand Acres, a retelling of King Lear set on a farm in Iowa. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1991 and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1992. It became a movie and, two years ago, an opera. Since then, she’s been steadily publishing and now has more than 25 books to her name.

“I was lucky in the way that my career got started,” Smiley says. “It was lucky in a way that it continued. I was lucky to win the Pulitzer. And I really enjoyed that. I said, ‘OK, I want to write about someone who’s lucky, but I don’t want it to be me. Because I want to contemplate the idea of luck, and see how maybe it works for somebody else.'”

click to enlarge

Both the book, and Jodie’s good luck, start at Cahokia Downs in 1955. Jodie’s Uncle Drew, a father stand-in, takes her to the racetrack and has her select the numbers on a bet that turns his last $6 into $5,986. She gets $86 of the winnings in a roll of $2 bills.

Smiley, a horse lover throughout her life, used to love looking at the horses at the racetrack before she understood how “corrupt it is at work.” (She also reminisces about pony rides at the corner of Brentwood and Manchester across from St. Mary Magdalen Church and riding her horse at Otis Brown Stables.)

Unlike Smiley, Jodie is not a horse person. And at first, Jodie feels somewhat disconnected from her luck — it’s something other people tell her that she possesses. She’s lucky to live where she does. She’s lucky that her mom doesn’t make her clear her plate, that her uncle has a big house, that she gets into John Burroughs. Later, she begins to carry those bills around as a talisman.

“[I] made a vow never to spend that roll of two-dollar bills — that was where the luck lived,” Jodie thinks after a narrow miss with a tornado.

It’s John Burroughs that changes Jodie’s life, just as it did Smiley’s. But instead of falling in love with books in high school and becoming a writer, Jodie falls into music. She eventually gets into songwriting, penning tunes as a sophomore at Penn State that launch her career.

One of Jodie’s songs should instantly resonate for St. Louis readers.

“The third one was about an accident I heard had happened in St. Louis,” Jodie recalls in the book, “a car going off the bridge over the River des Peres, which may have once been a river but was now a sewer. My challenge was to make sense of the story while sticking in a bunch of odd St. Louis street names — Skinker, of course, DeBaliviere, Bompart, Chouteau, Vandeventer. The chorus was about Big Bend. The song made me cry, but I never sang it to anyone but myself.”

Throughout the book are Jodie’s lyrics, alongside the events that inspire them. Writing them was a new experience for Smiley, who found herself picking up a banjo gifted by an ex and strumming the few songs she’d managed to learn, as well as revisiting the popular music of the novel’s time — the Beatles (George is Smiley’s favorite), Janis Joplin and the Traveling Wilburys, along with Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, and Peter, Paul and Mary — basically “all the folk singers.”

“I really love music, and I do wish I’d managed to practice, which I was always a failure at,” Smiley says. “… I liked that they made up their own lyrics, and they made their own music, and I was impressed by that.”

Both Smiley and Jodie grew up in households replete with record players and music. It’s one of their great commonalities.

A great difference between the two? That would be sex. At one point, Jodie compares her body count, which she calls the “Jodie Club,” with a lover — 25 (rounded up, Jodie notes) to his 150.

“That was a lot of fun,” says Smiley. “She learns a lot from having those affairs, and she enjoys it. She’s careful. And I like the fact that she never gets married, and she doesn’t really have any regrets about that.” (Smiley has been married four times.) “In some sense, her musical career has made her want to explore those kinds of issues of love and connection and sex and the way guys are.”

You can tell Smiley had a good time writing this. After Jodie loses her virginity, she thinks, “The erection had turned into a rather cute thing that flopped to one side.”

“Oh, it was fun,” Smiley confirms. “Sometimes I would say, ‘OK, what can I have Jodie do next? What’s something completely different than what I did when I was her age?’ And then I’d have to think about that and try and come up with something that was actually interesting. I knew that she couldn’t do all the things that I had done, and she had to be kind of a different person than I was. And so I made her a little more independent, and a little more determined.”

click to enlarge VIA THE SCHOOL YEARBOOK Jane Smiley’s high school yearbook photo. In Lucky, Jodie recalls of a classmate, “The gawky girl had stuck her head into a basketball basket, taken hold of the rim, and her caption was, ‘They always have the tall girls guard the basket.'”

Lucky follows Jodie from childhood to into her late 60s. At several points in the novel, she crosses paths with a Burroughs classmate, identified only as the “gawky girl.” Jodie takes note of her former classmate, but she’s not recognized.

Toward the end, Jodie walks into Left Bank Books and sees the gawky girl’s name on the cover of a novel.

“Out of curiosity, I read a few things about the gawky girl. Apparently she really had been to Greenland, and the Pulitzer novel was based on King Lear, which I thought was weird, but I did remember that when we read King Lear in senior English, I hadn’t liked it,” Jodie thinks. “… I remembered walking past her in the front hall of the school, maybe a ways down from the front door. She was standing there smiling, her glasses sliding down her nose, and one of the guys in our class, one of the outgoing ones, not one of the math nerds that abounded, stopped and looked at her, and said, ‘You know, I would date you if you weren’t so tall.'”

Sound familiar? Does it help to know Smiley is 6’2″?

The doppelgangers meet face to face after their 50th Burroughs’ reunion at the Fox and Hounds bar at the Cheshire. To go into what happens next — it’s too much of a spoiler.

“In every book, there’s always a surprise,” Smiley says. click to enlarge ZACHARY LINHARES Smiley enjoys St. Louis place names, and DeBaliviere is one of many in the novel.

Jodie Rattler’s St. Louis

Lucky is a smorgasbord of familiar names and places for St. Louis readers, and picking them out will be a big part of the joy of the book for locals.

“I love many things about St. Louis — not exactly the humidity, but lots of other things,” Smiley says. “One of the things I love is how weird the street names are. So I had to put her in that house on Skinker, and I had to refer to a few other places that are kind of weird. I couldn’t fit them all in.

“But I love the way that those street names and St. Louis are a real mix, and some of them are true French street names. Some of them are true English street names. Like Grav-wah or Grav-whoy” — here she deploys first the French and then the St. Louis version of “Gravois” — “whatever you want to call it, and Clark. It’s just really interesting to look around there and sense all of the different cultures that lived there and went through there.”

Jodie grows up in a house on Skinker near Big Bend. It’s “a pale golden color, with the tile roof and the little balcony,” Smiley writes. Jodie walks through Forest Park and eats at Schneithorst’s. Her mother works at the Muny; she shops at Famous Barr. Her grandfather prefers the “golf course near our house on Skinker,” which must be the Forest Park course. Jodie goes to Cardinals games, the Saint Louis Zoo and Grant’s Farm. She visits and thinks about St. Louis’ parks such as Tilles and Babler. Even the county jail in Clayton gets a mention.

Of course, Chuck Berry shows up several times, first mentioned for getting “in trouble for doing something that I wouldn’t understand.” Later, as Jodie drives by his home, she drops some shade on the county along the way: “Aunt Louise knew where Phyllis Schlafly’s house was, so I drove past there — another reason not to choose Ladue,” she writes.

Jodie and the man who invented rock & roll later meet face-to-face briefly at a festival near San Jose, California. “My favorite parts were getting to walk up to Chuck Berry and say, ‘I’m from St. Louis, too. Skinker!’ and having him reply, ‘Cards, baby!’ and know that no one nearby knew what in the world we were talking about,” Jodie recalls.

Lucky feels like a bit of a members-only club, and here the club is St. Louis. There is barely a page that is without some kind of reference — to the point where one might wonder if non-locals can even keep up. (Though they should rest assured: It’s a good read.)

“I write more or less to do what I want to do, and so I wrote about the things that interested me,” Smiley says. And more than 50 years after she graduated high school and left Webster Groves for Iowa and (briefly) Iceland and California, where she lives today, St. Louis, clearly, qualifies.

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