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.
