There is a bird in the parking lot of almost every shopping centre in America. There is a worm in almost every garden. There is a bee on almost every flower. None of the three were here before Europeans arrived. All three came on ships.

This full documentary covers five animals that are now so completely part of the American landscape that almost nobody questions them, and every one of them is an import. A bird released into Central Park by one man in 1890, and the famous explanation for why he did it turns out to have been invented decades after his death. A creature so ordinary that finding one is not worth mentioning, which is currently stripping the floor of the northern forests because those forests spent ten thousand years developing without it. An animal that now numbers over six million across the southern states, descended from a Spanish food supply landed in 1539 and a hunting estate in 1912. An insect that does not appear in North America before 1622, and which competes with the four thousand native bee species that were pollinating this continent long before it arrived.

And at number one, the animal at the absolute centre of the image of the American West. The cowboy, the cattle drive, the Texas longhorn. Descended from an extinct European wild bull, carrying Indian ancestry, landed in the Caribbean in 1493, worked by methods invented in Mexico, standing on grassland that was emptied of its original inhabitants to make room.

You can watch the full documentary about any of these animals here: America's Prehistoric Animals Documentaries

CHAPTERS
00:00  The Bird, the Worm and the Bee
00:51  One Man, One Park, 1890
06:10  It Is Taking the Forest Apart
11:29  A Spanish Food Supply and a Hunting Estate
16:53  There Were None Before 1622
22:01  The Most American Animal Is Not American
27:33  Ordinary Things, Strange Histories

SOURCES & FURTHER READING
Starling: 60 birds released in Central Park on 6 March 1890 by Eugene Schieffelin, about 40 more in 1891
The Shakespeare motive has no contemporary source and traces to a 1947 essay — peer-reviewed (Fugate and Miller, Environmental Humanities, 2021)
Population peaked at circa 200 million; recent estimates 85 to 93 million and declining. Competes with native cavity nesters. A 1960 Boston takeoff crash involved a starling flock. Mozart kept one in Vienna from 1784
Glaciation removed earthworms from northern North America; all terrestrial earthworms in states such as Minnesota are non-native, at least 15 species. Vectors: ship ballast, root ball soil, discarded bait — Minnesota DNR
Invading worms strip the duff layer, reducing tree seedlings, ferns, trillium and the goblin fern — University of Minnesota. A 2022 Alberta study links higher worm numbers to lower insect abundance — Biology Letters
Asian jumping worms (Amynthas) have spread across the eastern United States in two decades, converting surface soil within a season, moving through the horticultural trade
Feral hogs: over six million across 30-plus states, damage in the billions. De Soto landed pigs in Florida in 1539; Eurasian boar released on hunting preserves circa 1912; the modern animal is a hybrid
Sows breed at six months with two litters a year; circa 70 percent annual removal is needed merely to hold numbers steady. Deliberate translocation for hunting still drives spread
Honeybees are not native. Virginia Company records hives shipped 5 December 1621, arriving Jamestown early 1622 — Eva Crane, World History of Beekeeping
Jefferson recorded in 1785 that the bee was not native, spread ahead of settlers, and was called the white man's fly; attribution of the phrase to Native peoples traces to John Eliot and is questioned
North America has circa 4,000 native bee species, many in decline; managed hives compete for forage and can spread disease. Circa two million hives are trucked to California each February for almonds
Circa 90 million cattle in the United States. Cattle descend from the aurochs, domesticated twice circa 10,000 years ago; the last wild aurochs died in Poland in 1627
Columbus carried cattle in 1493; Texas longhorn genomes carry both European and Indian ancestry — peer-reviewed (McTavish et al., PNAS, 2013)
Cattle working practice and vocabulary derive from Mexican vaquero tradition: lasso, lariat, rodeo, corral, chaps, ranch, bronco
Bison numbered an estimated 30 to 60 million and were reduced to a few hundred within decades; cattle now occupy the same grassland at higher total numbers

#Wildlife #NaturalHistory #InvasiveSpecies #Honeybees #AmericanWest