A MURMURATION OF STARLINGS

 

A MURMURATION OF STARLINGS

Coming home after a winter’s day on the North Cornwall coast some years ago, we noticed as we passed Davidstow, the disused wartime aerodrome of the Coastal Command, small groups of starlings were flying up from the south and perching in the tops of the trees that studded the banks at intervals. They flew up and went towards the aerodrome as we disturbed them. Curious, we turned and followed them back to the wide area of short grazed turf between the runways. The small groups merged with a flock already forming. It grew and grew, with flocks coming in from all directions. They swirled high up into the clear sky, wheeling and turning, sometimes closing up into a tight black cloud, and then as if they were a fluid, poured into looser silvery shapes, bulging and flowing. We were transfixed by the constantly changing shape, black and tight then billowing out in a loose formation as if smoke was being wafted by an invisible hand.

As the light faded, groups broke away and gradually flew lower down over the big conifer plantation alongside the runways, then suddenly plunged into the tree tops. Bunch after bunch detached from the main flock and came down into the trees until at last they were all in and the spectacle was over.

We went home exhilarated by the sight. We soon heard from our birding friends that this roost had been known for several years. It wasn’t ‘our discovery’ at all! It turns out they have been known there for at least forty years.

 

Flying in to roost after aerial evolutions.

Every year since, we have made many winter visits. The spectacle never fails,nor is it  ever the same. We have never seen a repeat of that first event, so prolonged, so high up in the clear sky above us. If the weather is bad, the birds tend to fly in low and fast and with a minimum of evolutions fly into the roost more abruptly.

On one occasion, looking for them up in the sky, we missed them at first. They were coming in low, barely skimming the banks and pitched down onto the short turf between the old pitted runways. They settled thick and close, like a black carpet, probing frantically. The birds at the back were constantly rising and flying over the flock and settled at the front of the mass, and thus they gradually rolled across the airfield till they reached the plantation where they rose up and poured into the trees. They had seemed oblivious of us parked in their path, and at the last minute flew up and over the car, still very low, and settled just in front of us and continued their onward flow, apparently feeding voraciously as they move

Black cloud of starlings as they came in to land on grass beside us.

Dense carpet of starlings settling on the grass for a last feed before roosting.

 

 On yet another occasion we decided to park along a road which passes through the plantation. We had a more limited view of the evolutions, but on cue at twilight they flew in and settled in the trees to our right, their calls and restlessness rising to a crescendo like rushing water until suddenly all went quiet and they rose again in a steady sequence and flew over, behind and ahead of us in an endless stream, to settle again in the trees to our left. This was the bigger section of the plantation and perhaps they had decided there was more space that side. Even so, as they settled in the near dark we could see them clustered thickly among the higher branches, silhouetted against the sky like a black hoar frost.

Once settled, their loud chatter subsided, the patrolling buzzards disappeared and darkness closed over.

Remembering Robert Browning’s narrative poem about the Pied Piper of Hamelin, that mediaeval folk tale about how the piper lured away a plague of rats, I wondered if Browning had witnessed a starling murmuration and that influenced his description in his poem.

I quote: “....and ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered,

You heard as if an army muttered,

And the murmuring grew to a grumbling,

And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling,

And out of the houses the rats came tumbling....”

A few years ago, apparently inexplicably, they decamped and now fly in to roost in another plantation a mile or so further onto the moor, but the aerobatic display is every bit as spectacular.

Nearly 50 years ago we found a much smaller flock which roosted in a small plantation in the Tamar Valley. Their droppings killed the trees over a number of years, and they too decamped,. They were either moved on or they didn’t have the safety and cover given by the pine needles and moved of their own free will.