Is this what our skies once looked like year-round? The pale grey above my west Dartmoor home is busy with birds. Winter is a season of coming together – a time when many bird species gather in flocks to feed and roost. Few do so with such enthusiasm as starlings, and the sky where I live, so often a blank canvas, is fretted with their shifting silhouettes.
A few are attracted to birdseed in my garden, swaggering confidently up the lawn, dark winter plumage freckled with constellations of white. For such social birds they are quarrelsome – bickering over the food, strident voices jangling like keys in a blender.
Some people are not fans of starlings, given their voracious appetites and lack of table manners. But I have always admired their brashness. When other species dart for cover at the slightest hint of danger, they stand their ground, looking around as if to say: “Who’s asking?”
Sadly, our starling population has been declining for decades and they are not common where I live in the breeding season. However, during the colder months they arrive here in numbers, swelled by visitors from Europe. Squadrons pass overhead while ragged platoons march across the muddy fields, gorging on invertebrates.
Such flocks provide a welcome illusion of abundance – a sense of what might once have been even 50 years ago, when tens of millions more birds called the UK home throughout the year.
In the fading light of late afternoon, those in my garden join congregations peppering the sky, all heading off towards favoured roost sites like iron filings drawn by a magnet. Somewhere not too distant, before settling down for the night, they will put on the swirling displays for which they are famous.
I can hardly bring myself to use the word. Murmuration. A term better suited to a polite theatre audience than such a noisy avian spectacle. The vast fizzing clouds I have witnessed rush past with a sound akin to motorway traffic in the rain, or the “Shush!” of a thousand librarians.
If starling populations continue to decline, these roosts may one day become little more than a murmur. But not yet. For now, profusions of starlings still breathe life into these winter skies.
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