A Close Encounter with a Starling

 This week, the powers that be flicked a switch, and the seasons changed.

In the space of a day, we went from mild weather to strong winds, heavy rain, and a chill in the morning air. The birds have noticed this too. All of a sudden, the goldfinches at work have formed up into their busy, tweeping flock of about 50 birds busy raiding the teasel. The local kestrel presumably having bred is back at work hover hunting over the grassland, and then there are the starlings. 

A flock of about 80 birds have arrived on campus, skittish, carrying out mini murmurations as the afternoon draws on. We used to have a big roost of pied wagtails here, and I'm hoping that we might see starlings adopt our workplace as their overnight haunt too, wishing that we get huge formations of these intelligent, noisy birds performing their teardrop aerobatics over the unlikely vistas of car parks and industry. 

I was out on my lunchtime walk when I encountered one of these starlings feeding by the wildflower mini-meadows I helped create. It was so unafraid I felt it must be a juvenile bird entering its first winter; it let me get to three metres away without being remotely perturbed as it probed the ground with its beak for food.

Attracting odd glances from passers-by, I dropped to my belly and wormed my way closer, to about a metre and a half, admiring the beautiful green and purple irridescense from its plumage, and with my mobile phone, actually managed to get half decent photographs of a songbird. 

All the while it tweeted conversationally, as if asking who this huge purple clad interloper was.

It was an encounter I badly needed.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 30.09.21

Starling Hierarchies

Was out running today, not a huge run, just round the two lakes and along the river. Truth was, my legs were heavy and stuff after doing Parkrun yesterday, and my motivation was sapped by the comfort of being under my duvet on the sofa.

But I still went, dammit!

So, at about 4pm, I was crossing the marina bridge at the back of a well known budget supermarket, when I looked up the weight bearing tower, and saw a number of starlings sat upon it, either pre or post murmuration. They were perched in lines, probably about 50 birds in all, some on the tower, some on the suspension cables.

And it was clear that as I had seen on Autumnwatch footage about Brighton West Pier, there was a genuine "pecking order" (sorry) in place.

Some birds would fly straight into position, several other birds would shift along, and a bird would then have to fly off. This bird would flap off and try and settle down elsewhere, and be immediately chased off, until it found a spot which was presumably appropriate to its status, whereupon another bird was squeezed off.

There was a slightly seperate group of 4 or 5 birds engaged in an endless swapping of positions on a suspension wire.

I was watching entranced for a good 7 or 8 minutes, until the presence of other people on the bridge made me feel like I was being considered a staring-in-the-air nutcase. So I continued my run, and frankly still probably looked as strange as anything!

Copyright Cream Crackered Nature 03/11/13

Murmurations Redux; People versus the Starlings

I noticed in the Newark Advertiser on thursday 28th Feb, that the Lincoln Road, Winthorpe Road area starling murmurations have been a talking point in town for a little while.

The locals are complaining about the noise, and the mess. Apparently some folk have even been shooting rockets into them...

Heaven's sake, one of the most powerful sights nature can provide, for free, on your doorstep, for the first time anyone can remember in that part of town, and all folk can do is complain about a bit of bird mess on their cars, and the tweets and whistlings interrupting their enjoyment of "The Chase" on ITV. Or whatever crucial televisual feast it is that requires bird free concentration at 530pm.

As Spinal Tap would say, I'd be devastated if I wasn't under such heavy sedation.

The Grandest Murmuration

Cycling home from work tonight, struggling on a flattening tyre yet again, I could see them in the far distance even as I entered the badlands of the wasteland cycle path.

Electrons in a cloud chamber...starlings over the KFC.

At times of the year when I'm cycling home in the evening twilight, I'm used to seeing small murmurations along Winthorpe Road and over Macdonalds, and over by the turn onto Northern Road, but this was crazy. It wasn't gaggles of thirty to fifty birds, it was three to five thousand birds in an ever shifting swirl of chaos; a cartoon swarm of hornets making question marks and arrows in the sky; the universe a nanosecond after its creation.

A swarm of birds larger than a football pitch.

Never seen anything like that in any urbanised area before, let alone Newark. It's a sight I shan't forget in a hurry.

Starling Hunt

OK, I wasn't really hunting Starlings. I didn't have a rifle, catapult or even a pea shooter as I set off on what ended up being my longest run for a fair old while. I just had my eyes, and an ancient mp3 player with rubbish sports headphones that keep falling off my ears.

London Road lake, plenty of male tufted duck in their neat plumage, the solitary grebe, blackheaded gulls and the usual coots and moorhens. The baby moorhens are growing up. They were born late, but the winter has so far been a mild one.

Now that I've written that, I'm sure I'll be frozen to death while cycling to work, miserable, cursing, at 6am in the next few days.

I ran the whole muddy length of Clay Lane, proper cross country running that, but too twilight to see much, r indeed anything, before I headed across Beacon Hill estate and through Beacon Hill reserve; not much to be seen here either - note to self, start your runs earlier.

But on the industrial estate, things were rather more fun. The Starlings were in their "murmurations" (blame Autumnwatch if that is not a proper word...) - lots of them.

The first group, about 200 birds or so, was up by X2 Connect on Brunel Drive, there was a flock here yesterday as well. But as opposed to yesterday, when I was a bit earlier, these birds were not gradually coming up and gradually merging into one flock, these birds were commencing their first tentative dives down into the trees and bushes in which they roost.

Another flock, the largest, which absorbed a smaller flock as I ran past, was bigger, and was at the other end of Brunel Drive where it meets the main road by KFC. Turning towards town, another small flock of 100 birds was about 200 metres further down the road, and over the Winthorpe Road estate another flock was making these strange, flowing, punctuation marks in the sky.

A fifth flock - this sounds like the narrator of HG Wells' War of the Worlds meeting the dying martians in their fighting machines in Dead London - was operating over the Mace store and post office apart half way towards the bridge, and as I looked towards town in the distance, there was another flock over the new Co-Op, I reckoned.

But as I arrived a couple of minutes later, the light fading to grey, a darker grey, they had gone. They had decided enough was enough, and settled for the night! And as I looked back, the other flocks were down as well.

All the Starlings asleep for the night! Their flying, commas and full stops and brackets upon the sky, was over, so much easier for them than if I bought one of those gliders I admire so much on Brunel Drive whenever I run by.

Surely not in this wind!

But go out I did! And not just walking. I even managed to do a little jog for about 3 and a half miles, although my legs aren't thanking me for it now.

Like Bill does for Sookie, I ache.

I am annoyed at becoming so feeble.

Anyway, it would appear that anything feathered had the sense to stay out of the air today, the bush outside my living room window was full of weatherblown sparrows looking like the sort of xmas decorations I wish I had.

On London Road lake, the waterfowl were all collected down the eastern end, where I'm guessing someone had been lobbing bread in. The Tufted Ducks and the solitary Grebe were not party to these socialist handouts and remained aloof further out in the water. No young Moorhen in the choked little drain though today.

On Northern Road, as the sun dipped below the horizon, the starlings were gathering. One small flock at the Laurens end of about 150 birds, and down at the Winthorpe Road end, I noticed 4 small flocks take off from various trees and bushes round and about, and commence the evening murmuration at about 1545.

The way the small flocks gradually merge fascinates me. It's like two badly superimposed pictures of flocks passing in front of one another, clashing, as if on different plastic sheets being held to the sky.

But then the birds begin to harmonise their movements, and the two flocks begin to move in unison, no longer clashing against the winter cobalt sky but circling together, seemingly spirallying until two become one.

More Vignettes of Doom

There's that word again...

First one was at work today. Sipping at my plastic cappucino, I watched as a Buzzard lazily took flight from a tree, and then hovered motionless in the breeze for the longest time I have ever seen a bird stay still, this brutal bird of play splaying delicate wingtips in the wind. Eventually it spiralled upwards without so much a twitch of wing.

Two second ones, while cycling home. Initially it was the rooks heading home after a days squabbling somewhere, presumably rooks heading for the rookery. Or possibly sewage farm judging by the direction. And then, my first proper flock of starlings on the autumn by the railbridge. About a hundred birds or so, but rapidly being joined by other smaller flocks arrowing out of the bushes like a cartoon flock of bees...gradually swelling and swolling until the skies are black with beating wings. Starlings from all over the world block out the sun, and a starling winter begins forever!

STARLINGS COULD BE THE DOOM OF US ALL!!!

Starlings in Brighton be Damned!

Or no Starlings in Brighton, as the case may be.

These days, I have reasons to be in Brighton, and although running 11 miles along the seafront and through the attractively obscure parts of town is very enjoyable, the wildlife as perhaps mentioned before, is a bit disappointing.

It's Herring Gulls, Herrling Gulls, Immature Herring Gulls and more Herring Gulls. Hovering into the wind. Mobbing each other for food. Mobbing innocent passers by for food, although without the savage and brazen intelligence of the gulls of Padstow that poach the 12 quid fish suppers bought from Rick Stein's posh chippy.

But I'm told that the Starlings of the seafront are a real spectacle. Every day, they gather in Hove in increasingly large flocks before making their way to the pier to roost as the twilight darkens. I believe they might even have been on a SomethingWatch programme a couple of years ago.

Well, wherever they may have been, I never saw them! Everynight before I arrived they were about. And then as soon as I left, they were back. But every night I was there, no bloody Starlings. Irridescent white spotted swine, I curse them.

In other news, I am hoping for Fieldfares and Redwing in my Holly tree now that autumn is here and I have a fine crop of berries, and spotted a large mixed flock of Pied and Yellow Wagtails I think on the wasteground by work. I wonder what my Autumn runs will bring me?