A Sky Full of Birds

by Matt Merritt

  Often the sighting of a rare bird is put to good use. If it’s in a private location (and of course, plenty of rarities turn up in gardens and car parks and the like), a small charge can be made for access, with conservation charities benefiting. On one famous occasion, when a white-crowned sparrow (an American vagrant) turned up in Cley, Britain’s most birdwatched parish, more than £6,000 was raised towards the local church’s restoration fund, with the bird itself being immortalised in a new stained-glass window. Students of history might reflect on how appropriate it is that any sort of sparrow should benefit the church in this way: in the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, King Edwin of Northumbria is famously converted to Christianity when a counsellor compares the life of pagan man to that of a sparrow which flits through the king’s feasting hall in winter – a brief period of light and warmth, with cold, dark nothingness at either end.

  But back to the present. What I can’t get my head around is the speed with which some seasoned twitchers will put one sighting behind them and move on to the next. It can seem as though they’re taking in little of what they see, and that the birds are no more than ticks on a checklist. The process looks uncomfortably like wishing your life away: that bird was great, but the next will be better … At such times it’s easy to see the addictive nature of twitching.

  But I’m being very unfair. Most twitchers, for a start, are able to indulge in their chosen pastime purely because they’re such good and experienced birdwatchers in the first place. Their trained eyes notice the smallest details of plumage, feather wear and structure and voice that casuals like myself would miss, so while twitchers might seem to be trailing around after other people’s discoveries, they’re generally far more likely than most of us to find rare birds in the first place.

  And then there are the different levels of twitching. Most birdwatchers end up keeping some sort of list. You can’t help but notice what you have and haven’t seen in your garden, and the satisfaction you get the day a wintering blackcap shows up on your feeders is every bit as great as photographing a red-flanked bluetail on the east coast. Once you’re a bit keener, you might start to keep a patch list, anything from the birds that you can see on foot from your front door, or at your nearest nature reserve, to the area covered by your local bird club. And you can subdivide these: a life list, for all-time sightings, and a year list, allowing you to compare trends over a long period of time. From there, you might move on to keeping a county list, something I’ve long done myself.

  On the one hand, making lists makes perfect sense: bird records are still collected by county recorders, and many bird clubs and ornithological societies are organised on a county basis. On the other hand, listing can result in some slightly absurd situations. My own home in Leicestershire is less than ten miles from the borders of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire and Warwickshire, but the wish to add to my county list might send me off forty miles, to the far side of Oakham (Rutland still counts as Leicestershire, in my book) in search of species that appear regularly much closer to home, but on the wrong side of a boundary established over a thousand years ago. I witnessed the most extreme example of this a few years ago, when a juvenile squacco heron turned up at Attenborough Nature Reserve, just outside Nottingham, in late autumn. This attractive creature is a regular but scarce vagrant to Britain, so twitchers both national and local were out in force. But, as it was doing its fishing in a little stream flowing into one of the lakes, you could hear many of the local birders urging it to cross from one side to another, allowing them to tick it on both their Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire lists.

  So perhaps there’s not so much difference, after all, between the different tribes of birder. We all, I suspect, do our own form of twitching – and if for some it involves driving the length of the A1 to see a vagrant American wader, rather than pedalling frantically across town at lunchtime to see your first local rough-legged buzzard, who are we to judge?

  Twitching, or any sort of birdwatching where rare birds are concerned, is all about context. Sit at Spurn on a day like today, and before long a single thought keeps recurring. Where are all these birds coming from?

  The answers can be many and varied. Some of the birds are British breeders, and a migration-watch like this can make you realise that just because something is rare or scarce on your own patch, it isn’t everywhere else. But most must be coming from further afield, from a great arc of the planet curving from Iceland and Greenland, through Scandinavia, and on into central and eastern Europe, and the forests of Siberia beyond that.

  Once you get your head around this, the often astonishing numbers of birds make sense. Falls like those which have deposited hundreds and thousands of redstarts, say, on the east coast, can seem absolutely incredible to us in the UK, where such a bird is nowhere particularly numerous. But travel to the forests of Eurasia, and hear redstart after redstart singing day after day, and you realise that such a fall is but a drop in the ocean. North-easterly and easterly winds might push big groups our way, but there’ll be even more days when even larger groups disappear south without ever coming near Britain.

  I was in Latvia recently, and whinchats and wood warblers were everywhere. At home, these birds would warrant a mention on my local bird group’s website, and they’d probably spark a minor local twitch, with all the seasoned Leicestershire listers turning up to get them on their county list for the year. But our Latvian guides barely noticed them, unsurprisingly, so used are they to their presence. The same went for bitterns: their booming was the constant soundtrack to most of the trip, yet they meant far more to us Brits than they did the locals, starved as we are of these gloriously strange birds.

  We stood at one site, listening to a bittern’s low-frequency courtship call, sometimes compared to blowing across the open neck of a bottle, but actually rather like a mobile phone vibrating on a wooden table; believe me, I tried to answer the bittern half-a-dozen times before I twigged. As we watched, a familiar sight drifted across the pool in front of us without any of us registering it, until our guide delightedly pointed out that this was his first Canada goose of the year, the species being a major rarity in Latvia rather than the ubiquitous toddler-botherer it is here.

  And so twitching is really about noticing what’s different, what’s new, what’s out of place. At its best it’s a way of honing skills and testing them against the bewildering variety of birds that can be thrown your way (the best twitchers don’t necessarily accept an initial ID until they’ve seen it with their own eyes). It can help highlight conservation priorities, and raise funds to address them. It can increase our knowledge of migration routes and timings.

  Above all, it’s about remembering that this is a world in constant motion, in which a whole continent’s birds can move en masse to another, with a diversion or two along the way. And nowhere is better to see and understand this fact than at Spurn, where the land itself is as provisional as the winds, and the frailty of its finger, pointing the way south, mirrors the precarious existence of the birds that pass through.

  10 Of a Single Mind

  British 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 s
tarlings 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.