Of a Single Mind Of a Single MindBritish poets like birds. Or at least, they like to write about birds. From anonymous Anglo-Saxon bards listing the seabirds of the wild and windy northern firths, through Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, to the nineteenth-century Romantics and their nightingales and skylarks, birds have been co-opted as metaphors and symbols ever since the English language was first written down. In modern times, this tendency shows no signs of abating. Just a decade or so ago, a flick through the pages of small-press poetry magazines would have revealed a preoccupation with seagulls. And, yes, ‘seagulls’ was the word used. You can imagine the paroxysms of anger experienced by any birders who read it.
These days, starlings have taken the seabirds’ place. Starlings strutting round gardens and lording it over the other birds at the feeders. Starlings singing their strange, half-improvised, half-stolen songs from atop TV aerials (although not for much longer, presumably). And starlings swirling and swooping in cloud-like flocks that even non-birders can tell you, without a moment’s hesitation, are called murmurations.
Admittedly I’m speaking with something of a vested interest, but I think the poets might have it right in this instance. Starlings might just be the most poetically resonant of all British birds. Not because they’re the most beautiful, or the most astounding in their behaviour – although they’re both – but because, more than with any other species, we each of us see them in our own way, and make of them what we will.
A murmuration is a prime example of that. It’s the end of October, and I’m standing on a slightly muddy path half an hour or so before dusk, back on the Somerset Levels where this whole business began. Scope and tripod are set up and waiting by my side, my binoculars are round my neck, and half-a-dozen similarly attired and equipped birdwatchers are strung out along maybe two hundred yards of path, some chatting with each other. There’s an elderly couple, too, armed with compact binoculars barely bigger than opera glasses, who tell me they’ve dropped in on the way back to their holiday cottage. They’re not birdwatchers – they want to be very clear about that – but they’ve heard what to expect here and they’re not about to miss it. Further along the path there’s another little knot of four men, all hefting Canon or Nikon DSLRs with huge zoom lenses. They talk among themselves, an arcane language of f-stops and ISO and auto-focus.
The conditions are perfect. A clear sky and little wind mean that when the first birds start to coagulate into a group, and then a full-blown flock, we can see it happen a mile off, quite literally. There are maybe twenty birds to start with, skimming low over the reeds and twisting and turning back and forth, but more appear, and quickly the twenty becomes two hundred. I don’t notice where the newcomers have come in from – I’m too busy focusing on the movements of the original nucleus – but some of them may well have flown thirty miles to reach this point.
By the time the murmuration has gathered four thousand or so participants, the cameras are clicking away merrily, and we watchers on the path are doing plenty of murmuring ourselves. We all seem compelled to call out loud the shapes the flock takes as the birds manoeuvre over the marsh: a flying saucer, a whale, a double-helix! Even, for one brief moment, a huge bird that spreads its wings then folds into a tight, black ball against the oranges and pinks of the sunset. For the photographers, this is what it’s all about – capturing the moment at which thousands of essentially everyday birds become something else entirely.
And the flock carries on getting bigger and bigger, as if every starling in Somerset was an iron filing hopelessly attracted to a giant magnet. When one of its swoops brings it lower and closer, we can hear the rush of massed wings, and a certain amount of chatter, and the impression that we’re seeing and hearing a single living entity is stronger than ever. It puts me in mind of one of the dragons of Nordic legend passing over.
That just reflects my own preoccupations, though. One of the photographers talks of galaxies of birds, spinning and spiralling away into blue space, and it’s hard to disagree. Another describes them as a firework display in negative. And the elderly couple, the defiantly non-birding pair, well, they might just hit the nail on the head: the movement resembles one of those speeded-up films of flowers blooming and withering, blooming and withering, they tell me. I nod.
The birds are what we want them to be, and they make poets of all of us.
Murmurations have made starlings a favourite of another select group of people – the newspaper subeditors and designers of Britain. Having worked as one of the former for many years myself, I can vouch for the utterly dispiriting feeling that descends on the newsroom some time after lunch on a slow day in winter, when there are still gaping great holes on a couple of the inside pages, and little prospect of anything happening to fill them.
Which is where starlings fly to the rescue. Their pre-roost gatherings – for that is what a murmuration is – have for years drawn the attention of any number of amateur photographers, as well as the press’s staff snappers. Keep a few of them on file, and you’ve got an eye-catching, beautiful space-filler for page 13.
All of which means that starlings enjoy a higher profile in the public consciousness than just about any other British bird species. Everyone, but everyone, knows that those dense but amorphous clouds of birds swirling across the page are starlings, and more than a few people will be inspired enough to go out looking for them in the flesh. Most people know that collective noun – murmuration. It’s a good one, because it conjures up both the complex vocalisations of this rowdy bird, subdued a little by distance, and the noise made by the massed wings of the flock sweeping back and forth; and it certainly feels more poetic than another of the collective nouns used for this species: an ‘affliction’. A third – a ‘chattering’ – is a perfectly straightforward and perfectly accurate description of a group of starlings on the ground, or perched; it’s rare that they’ll stay silent for long in such a situation.
So, while those hacks might have the (understandably) selfish motive of filling the paper as quickly as possible, over the last twenty years or so they’ve done the image of the starling an awful lot of good. And it was certainly an image that needed a boost.
Sometimes, when murmuration pictures appear in the press, there’s little more than an extended caption, telling you where the photographer spent yesterday afternoon, watching and waiting for the birds to gather. Sometimes, though, an enterprising subeditor has decided that the image needs a bit of context, and will dig around online for some recent research into exactly why the birds do what they do. And there’s no shortage of theories (which makes for more copy to fill space), but no definitive answer.
Which is to say, we know why starlings, and other birds such as waders, gather into large roosting flocks at night. There’s safety in numbers, for a start: any predator has far more chance of being seen or heard by thousands of eyes and ears. There’s warmth, too: the body heat of dozens of neighbours is available to help any individual starling make it through the cold night. And, although we don’t really understand how it works, there’s information exchange: the birds manage to pass on to each other exactly where the best feeding spots are for the day ahead.
What we haven’t worked out yet is exactly why starlings perform such intricate, extended pre-roost aerobatics. If safety is the paramount concern, does it really make sense to take to the air and advertise your presence to every predator within miles? If keeping warm is top of the agenda, isn’t all that flying around a waste of vital energy? And if information exchange is what it’s all about, surely that’s better done in a more relaxed fashion?
The likelihood is that all those motivations are outweighed by another consideration, which is the desire to create as large a flock as possible, and so maximise all of those other potential benefits. To do this, the original nucleus of the flock makes sure that it will be seen from as far away as possible. The more members that join, the more visible it becomes, and so the flock starts to feed on its own success.
Not every flock is successful, of course. The big murmurations – the ones that come to the attention of newspapers and TV programmes – usually centre on reed beds, or woodland, or sometimes man-made structures; but that doesn’t mean there aren’t smaller ones here, there and everywhere. Wherever they happen, the pre-roost aerobatics are part of the deal.
And that’s what’s unusual. Other birds that gather to roost generally do so more unobtrusively, or straightforwardly. Corvids and gulls head towards their overnight sites purposefully and directly, as do waders. My late afternoon journeys home from the office in autumn often start with straggling flocks of lapwings scudding low over the A1 before dropping straight into some flooded fields on the far side. And while waders such as knot and dunlin do perform mass flying displays to rival those of starlings, these also occur when they leave the roosts in the morning, or when moving between sites because of the advancing tide. No other species makes such a ritual of things as the starling.
If we don’t know exactly why starlings do what they do, when they do, we are at least closer to knowing how they do it. Research in recent years, using computer modelling, has helped us to understand just how thousands of birds can fly together almost wing to wing, without constant collisions and resulting mayhem. It seems that, regardless of how far away they actually are from each other, each starling bases its directional decisions on its nearest neighbours; whereas it had been thought previously that starlings took note of the position of every bird within a certain distance. The new model makes more sense: it only requires each bird to remain aware of the movements of half-a-dozen or so others, while maintaining flexibility and cohesion.
Marvelling at murmurations isn’t, as it turns out, a modern development at all. The Exeter Book, a tenth-century anthology that is the largest surviving collection of Anglo-Saxon literature, contains around ninety riddles. Some of them involve double entendres that would have failed to make the cut in a Carry On film, while others are relatively straightforward. One of them, in a recent translation by the poet Gary Soto, describes ‘small creatures … feathery as grain, fine as smoke … angling for the green pond but not touching down.’ Reading it, the average Briton, let alone the average British birder, will come up with the answer: starlings.
But, importantly, the unknown Anglo-Saxon poet was confident that his mead-hall audience would know the answer too. ‘We folks know them from a distance,’ he asserts in Soto’s version, conjuring up a picture of both thegn and ceorl – which is to say ‘nobleman’ and ‘peasant’ – lifting their heads briefly from the day-to-day trials and tribulations of the Dark Ages to marvel at the kaleidoscopic wonder unfolding before them. Or perhaps they just wanted to eat them; the Anglo-Saxons, as we’ve seen before, tended to view birds primarily in terms of their nutritional value.
The gatherings have continued to inspire poets over the years. The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a keen observer of the natural world like most of his ilk, was moved to write a description of a murmuration in the winter of 1799, saying:
Starlings in vast flights drove along like smoke, mist, or any thing misty without volition – now a circular area inclined in an Arc – now a Globe – now from complete Orb into an Elipse & Oblong – now a balloon with the car suspended, now a concaved Semicircle – & still it expands & condenses, some moments glimmering & shivering, dim & shadowy, now thickening, deepening, blackening!
As well as celebratory there’s something faintly ominous about the way Coleridge’s description progresses, but as mentioned earlier perhaps one of the reasons we like starling murmurations so much is that we can make of them what we will.
Throughout the centuries, starlings remained widespread and incredibly numerous birds. After the Second World War, and with the country in the twin grip of Cold War tensions and Space Age speculation, unexplained contacts started to show up on the increasingly powerful radars being used. Known as ‘angels’, they were tagged as UFOs, potential flying saucers, until someone started to notice that their movements matched those of the huge flocks of starlings that roosted in London each night, and moved out towards more open country each morning.
No doubt the decline was already setting in, but when I started birdwatching starlings were still incredibly numerous. Flocks of thirty or so regularly turned up on our suburban back lawn, strutting around with the agitated air of someone being forced to walk through a crowded shopping centre while wearing a straitjacket. Aggressive and noisy, they dominated the feeders. At about that time, the councils of various British cities were considering all sorts of drastic action to minimise the damage caused by huge, incontinent roosts of the birds all over their historic buildings. When I went to university in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, for example, in 1988, you could watch the starlings gathering at dusk each day to settle on the ledges and sills of the Georgian streets sweeping down to the river.
Since then, they’ve suffered a steep and worrying decline of around 50 per cent since 1995, with a dearth of nesting sites (as the older buildings they favour get replaced or renovated), and lack of insect food later in the summer (badly hitting second and third broods) getting the blame. They’ve become one of those species that, depending on where in the country you live, can appear to be as common as they ever were, or completely extinct.
The truth is, there are still an estimated 800,000 breeding territories in the UK, with numbers boosted further in winter by the arrival of millions of migrants from central and eastern Europe, and Scandinavia. Occasionally, the birds still cause the sort of consternation and alarm that novelist Daphne du Maurier would have appreciated. In parts of Britain, including East Anglia, farmers consider them an agricultural pest, and apply for licences to cull them; although how much good that does is a matter for great debate – you’d have to shoot an awful lot of starlings to make an appreciable difference, and even then you’d probably only create a feeding opportunity for more starlings, or other species.
But the general public aren’t safe, either. In February 2014, residents of a Hereford street told the national newspapers about the snowstorm of droppings that descended upon them when a flock of starlings started roosting in a nearby leylandii hedge. That hedge is significant, because every birder you speak to will tell you that, however plentiful the species still is in some locations, it’s less and less likely to be found in woodland. Back in the 1970s, when I started birding, the woods and forests were full of these birds, but while doing a monthly survey of a local deciduous wood over the last year, I haven’t seen a single starling.
It’s taken me a few years to appreciate it, but Heathrow Central Bus Station has its charms, despite the noise, fumes, crowds and delays. I’m sitting on one of the outside benches waiting for the 230 service, and it’s raining and blowing an autumn gale. So far, so British, but I’ve just spent the past week in South Africa, travelling through the Kruger National Park and up the east coast in search of birds and some of the world’s most iconic mammals under clear skies and blazing sun, so I’m feeling the opposite of homesick.
Among the highlights were violet-backed starlings, amethyst gems that glittered and flared under the unceasing Natal sun, and whose wheezing, buzzing, busy songs gave away their relationship to our own sole representative of this large Old World family (although the common starling has been introduced elsewhere, notably the United States, where it is considered a pest). And as I sit here, flicking through the new edition of Birds of Southern Africa, reliving a week’s worth of ‘lifers’ (the birder’s term for a bird they’ve seen for the first time ever), there’s a wheezing and buzzing from somewhere close at hand, and then two starlings arrive on the forecourt and commence their usual self-important parading around in search of food.
There are more, too, because from a little further away they’re answered with not only the same harsh, chattering racket, but also a collection of other sounds accrued in a lifetime of foraging in this most human of landscapes. A mobile phone’s ringtone. The hum and swish of electric doors. The warning beeps of a reversing coach, of course. Listen to any starling for long enough, and you’re taken on a trip through every location of its life. They’re avian samplers, relentless collectors of their aural surroundings, recyclers of the hummadruz of modern urban life. That’s because they are, in fact, closely related to mynahs, among the most renowned of avian mimics, which alone ought to be enough for them to throw off their dowdy image.
But look at them! Seriously – stop for a moment, and take a long, hard look at the next one that crosses your path, even if, like the one I’m watching, it’s picking its way around the edge of a gutter with its bill crammed full of discarded sandwich and dropped crisps. OK, so they’ll never win any awards for elegance: their flight silhouette is compact and functional, rather than rangy and dashing, and we’ve already talked about that ungainly, busy gait. But their colours and markings make up for all that.
When they are seen close up, in winter, it’s hard to know where to start. The way their apparent coal blackness at a distance disintegrates into a glorious swirl of blues and greens and purples as the light catches them, like the rainbow film of petrol on the drizzly tarmac in front of me. Or that constellation of stars radiating out from just below the bill? If this were a species that only turned up here once in a blue moon, as a vagrant on the east coast, for example, we’d go running to see it and photograph it and sketch it without a second thought. As it is, even now when the starling is far less common than previously, we rarely give it a second glance.
And while, as we’ve seen, this bird is deeply ingrained in our culture, it’s also strangely out of focus. That is, it’s always been there, but rarely the centre of attention; or else it’s co-opted as a metaphor, or forming part of a crowd scene. The reason, of course, is that it’s always been so common and widespread. Who needed to make a fuss about something that could be seen without effort?
So, as high as murmurations figure in our pantheon of natural wonders, isn’t it time to give the starling a bit more individual attention? Every one of them is a masterpiece in miniature, an exotic in exile, a wonder in itself, and a muse for every one of us.