In our classroom, a student holds a phone above her head like a trophy but she’s not looking for an angle on herself but at the starlings— she says birds—stuffing their beaks with Callery pears, bead-sized, softened by the freeze. Best they can do on this snow-dazzled day. Beautiful, she says, as she snaps photo after photo, birds flitting from branch to branch as if finished with being witnessed. They are stunning—purple-black, gold-speckled, fluffed up against the cold. I don’t tell her how they’re hated by farmers for their appetite and numbers, by birders who prefer indigenous species. I don’t tell the student about the pears, another blight, nor how starlings are largely responsible for their dispersal: bird and pear two forces propelling each other, teammates high-fiving as they rewrite the American landscape. I just agree—yes, they’re lovely. I’m tired of looking under every lid to find a festering fact, so I just say, they’re starlings, and hope she keeps the word, returns to it so the birds return to her—a pitch on which seeds of light hitch, tiny and persistent.