Back Issues: Angry Birds, Angry Citizens

In the heat of the summer of 1930, “noisy birds” at the intersection of Harvard and Vassar avenues caused a flap among angry locals. The “chattering” and “screeching” of “thousands of starlings, sparrows, and blackbirds,” and what The Swarthmorean delicately referred to as “other sources of displeasure,” spurred nearby residents to petition the Borough Council. Their hope was to get the police to “blaze into the trees with shotguns every night for a while,” which had apparently been the previous year’s solution.

This time around, however, the petitioners faced resistance. Some residents were far from happy about “a rain of shot pouring down on their heads after each siege of the police.” Burgess William Landis, whom Swarthmorean editor Robert E. Sharples periodically accused of overzealousness, proclaimed that shooting into the trees violated a borough ordinance. At the same time, borough magistrate David Ulrich “brought in several dead songbirds” that had been “shot by residents in the bird-infested area.” Clearly, the police were not the only ones using firearms. Ulrich announced that he was prepared to arrest anyone “who was caught doing any shooting.”

Members of the volunteer fire department found a less lethal approach. Instead of going after the winged menaces with birdshot, the firemen let loose their hoses. Although this helped a bit, many of the birds simply flew to safety. In “The Charge of the Bird Brigade,” a poem printed in The Swarthmorean and written with apologies to Tennyson, the author noted how the birds “must have chirped ‘Tee-hee’ when they “[f]lew to another tree.”

Retired history professor and former Swarthmore resident Laurie Bernstein has been busying herself during the pandemic by developing a database of back issues of The Swarthmorean, starting with Volume I, Number 1, from 1929. From time to time, we will reprint an article she selects from our archives with her commentary.