What if it makes me feel?

Starling murmurations, abundance, and our expectations of nature

I’m on Brighton seafront with my friend Kate and her dog, Tosca, waiting for a starling murmuration. We’re not on the pier itself, under which they roost – there are no dogs allowed – but next to it, on the groyne, its stones bright with blood that might be from a fist-fight or a landed fish: this is Brighton, so it’s anyone’s guess. Music thuds from the antic pier, its lights brightening in the dimming sky. A low, salmon sun underlights the winter clouds. Gulls hover and jeer.

The murmuration, when it comes, isn’t sudden or particularly breathtaking. No vast, recognisable shapes are formed such as those that do big numbers on social media, and the birds don’t come inshore to swoop low over our heads. It forms slowly, small groups appearing from a couple of directions, some seeming to coalesce out of the darkening sky itself. They are far out, over the water; the flocks join up to form larger masses which seem to flicker as the birds change direction, pulsing and circling.

It may not be spectacular enough for Instagram, but nevertheless it’s beautiful, and produces a quiet kind of joy. Kate and I are smiling, as are several of the people around us: some have come specifically to see it but others have stopped whatever else they were doing to watch for a few moments. Every so often a group of birds breaks away and funnels under the pier, chattering, to roost; after twenty minutes or so we realise it’s over. We go to the pub and talk about our lives and get a bit drunk.

The current vogue for murmurations interests me; at this time of year you can hardly move for Insta posts, Substacks, books, blogs and column inches about them, some of them admittedly mine. I suppose it’s what happens when a weariness with the always-on, lossless digital world produces a thirst for fleeting, authentic, sensory experiences, when social media, ever hungry for visual ‘content’, meets a creeping awareness of loss.

My father used to come home from work in London and tell me about the huge starling flocks over Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross, a nightly inconvenience to office workers who greatly resented being shat upon from on high. The London populations – like those elsewhere – crashed in the 1980s and the roosts disappeared; nowadays, starlings are red-listed, with a 53% decrease in UK numbers since 1995. So for most of us – excluding birders, or those who live near coastal areas favoured by waders like knot and dunlin – the sight of thousands of birds together is now rare. It is impossible to imagine sights such as the passenger pigeon flock of around 1.5 billion birds seen in 1813 by the artist and naturalist John James Audubon, in America, which took three days to pass overhead; even harder to believe that just a hundred years later the species would be extinct.

But to see a murmuration – even knowing all that – is to briefly experience not loss, but abundance. For the few moments in which they dance it is possible to believe in a comforting illusion: that the world still contains enough of something, that perhaps, after all, it is going to be OK.

The unpredictability of murmurations surely adds to their allure: I’ve stood dejectedly in reed beds and on beaches waiting for flocks that haven’t materialised, while sometimes the starlings do appear, but they don’t dance: they simply go to bed. This makes a successful encounter all the more special – and to me, that unpredictability is also comforting, albeit perversely. Believing we’re in control of everything is tiring, and a lot of responsibility. Understanding that we’re not the main character – that some things in the world have nothing to do with us – may be frustrating in the moment, even challenging to some, but settles a larger anxiety humming in the background. It does us good to be put in our place.

But not everyone is happy to submit to uncertainty, and the current interest in murmurations – including dedicated websites promising to help you find one – raises larger questions about their commodification as an experience with a predictable (and positive) outcome for humans, rather than as a phenomenon whose meaning is ineffable precisely because it’s unrelated to either our intentions, our needs, or our fears. As Westerners we are relentlessly anthropocentric, to which we must add the deep-seated individualism of the current moment. We may soon hit ‘peak starling’, at which point a backlash is likely to occur.

Luke Wright, whose poem ‘And I Saw England’ was featured in a previous issue, recently discovered that the most popular internet search term related to murmurations is ‘Are murmurations worth it?’ I can’t better his response, below, so I won’t try; his new collection, Are Murmurations Worth It?, is available to buy here.

My most moving and meaningful encounters with nature haven’t been murmurations, heartstopping though they can be. They’ve generally been unexpected, rather than when I’ve set out to see or experience something; usually, they’ve happened when I’ve been alone, and more often than not, at dusk or dawn. Then, aided by the half-light and freed from conscious intervention, it’s as though the surprising strangeness of the world is sometimes briefly revealed, its mystery unexplicated, the experience private and unshared.

I think of the great flock of warblers in the palaeontologist, poet and anthropologist Loren Eiseley’s 1957 essay ‘The Judgment of The Birds’:

It was a late hour on a cold, wind-bitten autumn day when I climbed a great hill spined like a dinosaur’s back and tried to take my bearings. The tumbled waste fell away in waves in all directions. Blue air was darkening into purple along the bases of the hills. I shifted my knapsack, heavy with the petrified bones of long-vanished creatures, and studied my compass. I wanted to be out of there by nightfall, and already the sun was going sullenly down in the west.

It was then that I saw the flight coming on. It was moving like a little close-knit body of black specks that danced and darted and closed again. It was pouring from the north and heading toward me with the undeviating relentlessness of a compass needle. It streamed through the shadows rising out of monstrous gorges. It rushed over towering pinnacles in the red light of the sun or momentarily sank from sight within their shade. Across that desert of eroding clay and wind-worn stone they came with a faint wild twittering that filled all the air about me as those tiny living bullets hurtled past into the night…

Alone on a dead planet I watched that incredible miracle speeding past. It ran by some true compass over field and waste land. It cried its individual ecstasies into the air until the gullies rang. It swerved like a single body, it knew itself, and, lonely, it bunched close in the racing darkness, its individual entities feeling about them the rising night. And so, crying to each other their identity, they passed away out of my view…

As I walked into my camp late that night, one man, rousing from his blankets beside the fire, asked sleepily, “What did you see?”

“I think, a miracle,” I said softly, but I said it to myself. Behind me that vast waste began to glow under the rising moon.

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What to look for in February

At last, the brave crocuses are opening their gapes like hungry baby birds, and the first of the cheery, trumpety daffs are out. I’m caught between wanting it to be spring right now and the deep unease of knowing we haven’t had a proper winter, at least where I am: only a couple of frosts – not enough to kill off many pathogens – hedgehogs out and about too early, as well as bumblebee queens, ladybirds and butterflies. I wrote about the lack of winter, as well as our local molly dancers and some gorgeous lapwings, in my most recent Times Nature Notebook.

The best thing for me about February is the increase in bird activity: by the end of the month what’s seemed for the last long while a quiet world will be busy with them again. As day length increases they start to vocalise more, and you’ll hear the very beginnings of this year’s dawn chorus starting to happen at sun-up (and the evening chorus at sundown): mostly robins, wrens, dunnocks and song thrushes, if you have them, but more and more carolling each day, peaking in late May and June. If you’re lucky, you might even hear your local blackbird break into song this month, for the first time since last summer. For me, that is such a red letter day.

You’ll see birds more, too, this month, with marked upticks in courtship behaviour like preening, begging and displaying, and small birds chasing one another around in hedges and cover as territories begin to be sketched out. In areas of woodland you’re likely to hear great spotted woodpeckers drumming: this they do to announce their territories, both male and female, rather than to excavate a hole. They choose hollow or resonant trees to drum on, or sometimes (needs must) telephone poles.

Given this increase in bird activity, now is the time to download the free Merlin birdsong identification app, if you haven’t already, along with the correct data pack for wherever you live. No identification app is completely reliable, something converts to Merlin’s wonders tend immediately to forget; however, Merlin (unlike many others) is very good indeed, and if you can commit yourself to get ‘eyes on’ to the bird in question, rather than simply going ‘nice!’ and closing the app, you’ll boost your own recognition skills, reducing the margin of error as you progress. I particularly love the way that when several birds are singing it highlights each one as it as it hears them so you can tell which is which.

Once you’ve learned who regularly visits your garden (or wakes you up at the crack of dawn) you can read a bit more about them and find out how you might support them, whether it’s providing the right sort of nest box or planting things to boost their food supplies. Looking after our nearby nature is not only deeply rewarding but central to being a good human, imo.

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In the next section I’ll be writing about failure, something that feels uncomfortably close at the moment: what does it really mean for an artwork of any kind to fail? How do you know, and who decides? Can anything good come out of it, and is a sense of failure an inescapable part of the creative life?

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