Friday, January 06, 2012

Happy little moments... watching the starlings murmur

Out of the window of my parents house in Devon, every evening in the magical betwixt hours when day sighs its last breath and night starts creeping in, a wonderful phenomena can be observed: the daily gathering of the starlings in the valley below. Did you know that a group of starlings is called a murmuration? It's one of those words that really captures the essence of the thing it describes. Every day, great swarms of them gather, and swoop around the valley in ever increasing numbers in a flurry of wings that swells and swirls, going this way and then that, like a secret rumour which is murmured, getting louder and louder until it cannot be ignored any longer. One evening, the sky turned a rather spectacular shade of lilacy pink and I took the chance to try out my new camera and capture some photos of those crazy wonderful birds.

Here they are when I first got snapping, bundled together, with dartmoor as their background...


Zooming in, the movements of their wings is captured in different states of flapping...


The sky got fuller and fuller of these birdy shapes, like scribbles on a page of purply parchment, each bird marking a secret message that only a madman can understand...


How do they all know to turn at the same moment? How do they all know where the next swooping movement will take them?


Here they are, turning the corner, face on, before they go round again, on their invisible carousel...


Perfect silhouttes, filling up the sky...


And right before I left them to it and got on with my evening inside...


Here's to a happy moment watching the starlings flock...
x

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