A Sky Full of Birds

by Matt Merritt

  But, importantly, the unknown Anglo-Saxon poet was confident that his mead-hall audience would know the answer too. ‘We folks know them from a distance,’ he asserts in Soto’s version, conjuring up a picture of both thegn and ceorl – which is to say ‘nobleman’ and ‘peasant’ – lifting their heads briefly from the day-to-day trials and tribulations of the Dark Ages to marvel at the kaleidoscopic wonder unfolding before them. Or perhaps they just wanted to eat them; the Anglo-Saxons, as we’ve seen before, tended to view birds primarily in terms of their nutritional value.

  The gatherings have continued to inspire poets over the years. The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a keen observer of the natural world like most of his ilk, was moved to write a description of a murmuration in the winter of 1799, saying:

  Starlings in vast flights drove along like smoke, mist, or any thing misty without volition – now a circular area inclined in an Arc – now a Globe – now from complete Orb into an Elipse & Oblong – now a balloon with the car suspended, now a concaved Semicircle – & still it expands & condenses, some moments glimmering & shivering, dim & shadowy, now thickening, deepening, blackening!

  As well as celebratory there’s something faintly ominous about the way Coleridge’s description progresses, but as mentioned earlier perhaps one of the reasons we like starling murmurations so much is that we can make of them what we will.

  Throughout the centuries, starlings remained widespread and incredibly numerous birds. After the Second World War, and with the country in the twin grip of Cold War tensions and Space Age speculation, unexplained contacts started to show up on the increasingly powerful radars being used. Known as ‘angels’, they were tagged as UFOs, potential flying saucers, until someone started to notice that their movements matched those of the huge flocks of starlings that roosted in London each night, and moved out towards more open country each morning.

  No doubt the decline was already setting in, but when I started birdwatching starlings were still incredibly numerous. Flocks of thirty or so regularly turned up on our suburban back lawn, strutting around with the agitated air of someone being forced to walk through a crowded shopping centre while wearing a straitjacket. Aggressive and noisy, they dominated the feeders. At about that time, the councils of various British cities were considering all sorts of drastic action to minimise the damage caused by huge, incontinent roosts of the birds all over their historic buildings. When I went to university in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, for example, in 1988, you could watch the starlings gathering at dusk each day to settle on the ledges and sills of the Georgian streets sweeping down to the river.

  Since then, they’ve suffered a steep and worrying decline of around 50 per cent since 1995, with a dearth of nesting sites (as the older buildings they favour get replaced or renovated), and lack of insect food later in the summer (badly hitting second and third broods) getting the blame. They’ve become one of those species that, depending on where in the country you live, can appear to be as common as they ever were, or completely extinct.

  The truth is, there are still an estimated 800,000 breeding territories in the UK, with numbers boosted further in winter by the arrival of millions of migrants from central and eastern Europe, and Scandinavia. Occasionally, the birds still cause the sort of consternation and alarm that novelist Daphne du Maurier would have appreciated. In parts of Britain, including East Anglia, farmers consider them an agricultural pest, and apply for licences to cull them; although how much good that does is a matter for great debate – you’d have to shoot an awful lot of starlings to make an appreciable difference, and even then you’d probably only create a feeding opportunity for more starlings, or other species.

  But the general public aren’t safe, either. In February 2014, residents of a Hereford street told the national newspapers about the snowstorm of droppings that descended upon them when a flock of starlings started roosting in a nearby leylandii hedge. That hedge is significant, because every birder you speak to will tell you that, however plentiful the species still is in some locations, it’s less and less likely to be found in woodland. Back in the 1970s, when I started birding, the woods and forests were full of these birds, but while doing a monthly survey of a local deciduous wood over the last year, I haven’t seen a single starling.

  It’s taken me a few years to appreciate it, but Heathrow Central Bus Station has its charms, despite the noise, fumes, crowds and delays. I’m sitting on one of the outside benches waiting for the 230 service, and it’s raining and blowing an autumn gale. So far, so British, but I’ve just spent the past week in South Africa, travelling through the Kruger National Park and up the east coast in search of birds and some of the world’s most iconic mammals under clear skies and blazing sun, so I’m feeling the opposite of homesick.

  Among the highlights were violet-backed starlings, amethyst gems that glittered and flared under the unceasing Natal sun, and whose wheezing, buzzing, busy songs gave away their relationship to our own sole representative of this large Old World family (although the common starling has been introduced elsewhere, notably the United States, where it is considered a pest). And as I sit here, flicking through the new edition of Birds of Southern Africa, reliving a week’s worth of ‘lifers’ (the birder’s term for a bird they’ve seen for the first time ever), there’s a wheezing and buzzing from somewhere close at hand, and then two starlings arrive on the forecourt and commence their usual self-important parading around in search of food.

  There are more, too, because from a little further away they’re answered with not only the same harsh, chattering racket, but also a collection of other sounds accrued in a lifetime of foraging in this most human of landscapes. A mobile phone’s ringtone. The hum and swish of electric doors. The warning beeps of a reversing coach, of course. Listen to any starling for long enough, and you’re taken on a trip through every location of its life. They’re avian samplers, relentless collectors of their aural surroundings, recyclers of the hummadruz of modern urban life. That’s because they are, in fact, closely related to mynahs, among the most renowned of avian mimics, which alone ought to be enough for them to throw off their dowdy image.

  But look at them! Seriously – stop for a moment, and take a long, hard look at the next one that crosses your path, even if, like the one I’m watching, it’s picking its way around the edge of a gutter with its bill crammed full of discarded sandwich and dropped crisps. OK, so they’ll never win any awards for elegance: their flight silhouette is compact and functional, rather than rangy and dashing, and we’ve already talked about that ungainly, busy gait. But their colours and markings make up for all that.

  When they are seen close up, in winter, it’s hard to know where to start. The way their apparent coal blackness at a distance disintegrates into a glorious swirl of blues and greens and purples as the light catches them, like the rainbow film of petrol on the drizzly tarmac in front of me. Or that constellation of stars radiating out from just below the bill? If this were a species that only turned up here once in a blue moon, as a vagrant on the east coast, for example, we’d go running to see it and photograph it and sketch it without a second thought. As it is, even now when the starling is far less common than previously, we rarely give it a second glance.

  And while, as we’ve seen, this bird is deeply ingrained in our culture, it’s also strangely out of focus. That is, it’s always been there, but rarely the centre of attention; or else it’s co-opted as a metaphor, or forming part of a crowd scene. The reason, of course, is that it’s always been so common and widespread. Who needed to make a fuss about something that could be seen without effort?

  So, as high as murmurations figure in our pantheon of natural wonders, isn’t it time to give the starling a bit more individual attention? Every one of them is a masterpiece in miniature, an exotic in exile, a wonder in itself, and a muse for every one of us.

  11 Dark Stars

  It had to happen, sooner or later. Part of the appeal of birdwatching lies in the
fact that nothing is guaranteed; and so, eventually, I was bound to draw a blank in my quest. I just hadn’t expected this particular part of it to prove so difficult.

  In 2007, a book called Crow Country hit the shelves. Written by Mark Cocker, who a couple of years earlier had been responsible for the magnificent Birds Britannica, it gave corvids the moment in the spotlight they so richly deserve. Here they were in all their glory. Among the most intelligent of birds, their rich and complicated social lives were opened up. Those who had previously dismissed them as ‘trash’ birds gazed on them with a newfound respect and fascination, while non-birders developed a more nuanced view of them than warranted by their previous roles as birds of ill-omen or coldly efficient cleaners of roadkill from our blood- and fur-spattered roads.

  The book also recounts the author’s fascination – some would say obsession – with one particular aspect of corvids: their propensity for forming huge, noisy roosts. Cocker describes how, at Buckenham Carrs, close to his Norfolk home, the skies were darkened each dusk by the passage of around 40,000 rooks and jackdaws heading back to the communal gathering. What emerges most strongly from the book is not only the staggering scale and grandeur of this phenomenon, but the complicated motivations the birds have for coming together in this way.

  And so I wanted to see for myself what all the fuss was about, to get just a hint of the complex social life – every bit as complex as our own, in fact – that these birds possess.

  I failed.

  The first time I tried, not that long after Crow Country came out, I happened to be passing through the area and decided, on a whim, to give it a shot. Noël Coward famously dismissed Norfolk as ‘very flat’, but its undulations, unspectacular as they are, can’t be ignored by the birdwatcher. The spot described by Cocker is in a wide, shallow river valley, but on this particular day, twenty feet in altitude made a world of difference. Back at the main road, or in the village close to the roost, it was a fine evening, with sun still bright through a slight haze. But down on the floodplain, a thick mist had descended, hiding anything that lay more than a few feet away. I stood, occasionally hearing the croak and bark of corvids passing overhead, but even those sounds were muffled by the cold, clammy blanket.

  Actually, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Family legend tells of a summer holiday, when I was three or four, in Sheringham in north Norfolk. My parents had booked a caravan for two weeks in August, but for the first seven days the whole of East Anglia was wrapped in a thick and all-enveloping fog. They abandoned any thoughts of the beaches, and instead tried to interest two small children in the county’s other attractions; finally despairing, they headed home to Leicestershire. There they encountered their next-door neighbour, stripped to the waist and bronzed after a week of gardening in blazing sunshine. So, after a day or two’s recovery, they looked at the forecast, and seeing that prospects for Norfolk seemed to be brighter, headed back east along the A47, thinking they might as well make use of the caravan they’d paid for. And it all looked good, until they reached Sheringham, and found it still cocooned in its immovable fog. I remember nothing of all this except a ride on a steam train (which at the time would have assuaged my disappointment considerably), but the story, retold every summer, gave me an unreasonable prejudice against the county of Nelson until my late twenties, when knowledge of its birding riches finally became too much to ignore.

  I’ve failed again today – and once more the weather was to blame. It was raining when I got there, a thin but all-enveloping November mizzle, and it was raining when I left; and although the precipitation never became more than a steady drizzle, it was enough to dilute the longed-for clouds of corvids to a steady but thin overcast of rooks and jackdaws that finally fizzled out just before sunset – and which fell a long way short of anything truly memorable.

  Then something strange happens. Over the next couple of weeks I’m shown that what happens at Buckenham Carrs is only one example of something that goes on right across the UK: a twice-daily movement of wildlife on a massive scale, were you to tot up the biomass involved.

  I see the same thing from the M1, for example: a long, purposeful stream of rooks making their way from freshly ploughed fields near Loughborough to some colony I’ve never seen, yet which might have been in place since the Vikings arrived in these parts, or before. Then I’m surprised late one Sunday afternoon when, as we sit watching TV, across the one small patch of sky visible from my girlfriend’s sofa, a loose, voluble straggle of jackdaws makes the commute from the sheep pastures to their roosting sites on the church and the older houses in the village. One evening not long afterwards, the sky close to the office is suddenly filled with a dense, swirling storm of ragged black wings, lifted from the soil by who knows what alarm or signal.

  And I start to grow a little obsessed myself. Corvids have always been among my favourite birds. I blame a teenage flirtation with gothdom – the original, 1980s incarnation, which involved listening to The Cure and Sisters of Mercy, not the more recent American phenomenon, with all its vampire nonsense. I find myself tracking the movements of particular groups of corvids as best I can. I leave the house ten minutes earlier each morning, so my route to work will intersect the passage nearby of a particular rook colony to the fields on the edge of the village. I notice the single-minded way they head straight to each day’s designated feeding area, and how one sheep pasture can hold a couple of hundred of these smartly trousered creatures (carrion crows, on the other hand, have tight-fitting knickerbockers), while the apparently identical pasture next door has not one. As Mark Cocker found out, and described with such precision and beauty, corvids have a deep and complicated relationship with the people of these islands.

  TV and film sound-effects people, even in this digital age in which practically any noise in the world should be only a few mouse clicks away, often paint their sound pictures using a surprisingly restricted palette. Need something to evoke a wild, lonely night in a northern wilderness? The eerie sound of the great northern diver (common loon, to Americans) is just the job, and failing that the mewing call of a red-tailed hawk. Never mind that the former is rare in the UK, and the latter unknown – both regularly pop up on British TV. You could, were you to go out into the street at such times, probably hear the low but steady rattle and chatter of a million birdwatchers shaking their heads.

  Likewise, any scenes in woodland tend to take place to the backdrop of the spring songs of common species, regardless of the time of year or the area of Britain being portrayed. And, if you need a sort of auditory shorthand for traditional British farmland, then there’s only one option – the insistent cawing of rooks. Actually, if the programme in question is set in autumn or winter, this sound isn’t a bad choice at all. Go for a walk pretty much anywhere outside the highland regions of these islands between October and March, and the harsh, flat ‘kaaa’ of the rook is likely to be your accompaniment at some point, perhaps mixed with the lively ‘chack’ of the jackdaw, or the harsher but more vibrant ‘kraa’ of the carrion crow.

  You might have noticed something about the names of all three of those species. They’re imitative of the actual sound the bird makes (well, in the jackdaw’s case, the first part of the name is). They’re far from unique in this respect, of course – cuckoo is probably the best-known example among British birds – but no other bird family contains such a concentration of monikers like this. Three other members of the family – raven (from Old Norse hrafn), chough and jay – have similarly onomatopoeic names, leaving only the now-ubiquitous magpie and that ultra-rare vagrant, the nutcracker, as the odd ones out.

  It would be perfectly reasonable to assume that there must be a reason for our fascination with these birds, and in fact there’s very likely several. All our corvids are, for a start, birds of reasonable size. The raven is by far the biggest, with a size and bulk roughly equivalent to the buzzard, but even the jackdaw is a step up from most of our familiar garden birds, so we tend to notice them when they cross
our path. Secondly, they tend to have very easily identified plumages – all black in most cases; black and white in the magpie’s; or a positively gaudy combination of pink, black, white and blue in the jay’s. So, corvids are visually conspicuous. Their calls also tend to be loud, frequent, resonant and distinctive, which means that even if we can’t see them, we’re rarely left in any doubt that they are in the vicinity.

  But there is, I suspect, another reason (albeit one linked with the fact that you always know when a corvid’s around). It’s as well that crows are strong flyers, because they carry with them perhaps a greater weight of association and implication than any other British bird family. True, other birds such as wrens have a great deal of folklore and superstition attached to them, but none of them match the corvids for their ability to instantly create an impression, even among people who have no real interest in birds.

  That impression is, admittedly, a bad one. Corvids are irrevocably associated with evil at worst, and a general sense of darkness and gloom at best. This probably has something to do with the fact that for centuries corvids (ravens especially, but no doubt many of the smaller species too) were known as carrion birds that appeared after battles to feast on human flesh. We have no vultures in Britain, so they would have been by far the most common participant in these gory banquets, and a glance through any general book on British history will remind you just how many battles there were in these islands until the middle of the eighteenth century. Traditional ballads such as ‘The Three Ravens’ and its variants (including the more cynical ‘Twa Corbies’) reflect that flesh-eating history.