This is the memory palace. I'm Nate de Mayo.

Sixty starlings in a wire cage, sit down in the snow in a moonlit field in Central Park.

Above them, the stars. You could see them back then in 1890,

before the city grew too tall and too bright.

A man opens the latch in the wire cage, and the starlings take flight.

Not really, not at first. It takes some time to stretch their wings,

cooped up as they'd been in that cage for so long. Others pat about in the snow,

freshly fallen that day, dig for seeds that aren't there at that time of year.

Others pick at fresh wounds from their time in the cage with all those beaks and talons and

poking wires. But let's say they just took flight. They all did eventually. And there is poetry in flight.

So, the man in the snow opened the wire cage, and watched the sixty starlings,

black wings speckled white like falling snow in the night,

like stars over Manhattan when you could still see stars over Manhattan.

Watch those birds fly skyward and starbound.

The man on the ground love poetry. He was Eugene Schiflan, an heir to the Schiflan farm

suitable forchin. And when he wasn't doing whatever it was he did at the family business.

It seemed he was thinking about Shakespeare. And that wasn't a high-falutin preoccupation,

though he and his family were among the highest and flutinist of New Yorkers.

Shakespeare was the thing that, a pop culture phenomenon, but the sion of some fancy family

could express his fandom in ways that the riffraff could not. So Eugene Schiflan decided to

recreate the world of Shakespeare's England in America, one bird at a time.

There are seventy-one individual species of birds mentioned in Shakespeare's collected works,

...