Country diary: orchestral manoeuvres in the dusk
All starling roosts are wonderful but some are more wonderful than others – a matter determined by numbers, their location, the prevailing light and wind, and one’s capacity to get close to the birds. Yet it was slow to build, and at 4.47pm I was beginning to wonder if it would happen at all. Then there was suddenly an evolving genie of birds.
Soon there were multiple genies, and as these formations revolved there were convulsive downward movements as hundreds entered the roost and vanished. Yet if thousands disappeared, thousands arrived, and the sky became a self-filling vessel.
It is difficult to define precisely why murmurations are so captivating, but perhaps it’s this. As they passed, the gyrations suggested to me the following: a flock of knots, a shoal of minnows, an army-ant colony in hunting spate across the rainforest floor, an octopus, an anaconda wound in round coil, a broad river’s flow but also its arching bridge, an ocean tide, a silk scarf in a breeze; they were autumn leaves torn down by a strong wind, black fireworks, a black rainbow and a single amoeba in phagocytosis.
These were not in sequence; they were all manifest simultaneously. I could perhaps describe it best if I could take all the letters from all those words and make a single construction that conjured all parts at once. Yet for every observer that imaginary word would have to be unique, because for each of us starlings summon different things.
Bear in mind also that a roost is not an inherited entity shaped by genes. It is a cultural phenomenon, passed on, one to another. Perhaps we should think of it as art involving movement and music, since one has both the geophony of the wind through trees, and the biophony of their voices and wings. The closest might be a ballet with orchestra, but recall that there is no rehearsal and it is entirely functional. Perhaps it’s more than any human art. It is starling art: made in soil of earthworms and leatherjacket mash, conceived in the moment, delivered in real time and unique each evening.
