TINKERING WITH EDEN: A NATURAL HISTORY OF EXOTICS IN AMERICA.(Review)

TINKERING WITH EDEN: A NATURAL HISTORY OF EXOTICS IN AMERICA By Kim Todd. W. W. Norton. $26.95.

In 1858, the poet William Cullen Bryant spent an inspiring evening at the New York home of Eugene Schieffelin, best remembered today as the anglophile eccentric who in 1890 would release cagefuls of European starlings into Central Park. At the time--in a kind of dress rehearsal for future mayhem--Schieffelin had just set loose a flock of English house sparrows. Bryant penned a joyous ode to commemorate the occasion, "The Old-World Sparrow," which began:

 
   We hear the note of a stranger bird, 
   That ne'er till now in our land was heard: 
   A winged settler has taken his place 
   With Teutons and men of the Celtic race. 
   He has followed their path to our hemisphere-- 
   The Old-World sparrow at last is here. 

It took just two decades for Bryant's lofty cadences to become the butt of jokes. In 1881, the obnoxious proliferation of house sparrows led one sporting-magazine correspondent to offer up a piece of doggerel titled "The Old World Nuisance":

 
   He defiles our porches, there's no denying that; 
   He has ruined my wife's dress and soiled 
   my best hat. 
   He hangs round the bird cage to pilfer the seed, 
   And gives the canary a foul insect breed. 
   He never eats worms, let us tell it abroad, 
   This Old World sparrow is a terrible fraud. 

The author of the second verse was Fred Mather, a pisciculturist with the U.S. Fish Com mission and frequent columnist for the magazine Forest and Stream. Ironically, just a few years after parodying Bryant's verse, …