Starlings!

Stick with it, eventually they descend into the reeds.

Just a snippet of an entry, a video of the Starling roost at one of my local patches, Kings Mill Reservoir. Perhaps only 250 birds and yet still a display worth getting away from the TV to go watch. Amazing how they all coordinate to form such dynamic flocks. There's some insight from a study (here) in Rome that goes some way to explaining the phenomenon. Lots of techno-babble in there, but the gist seems to be that each individual bird orientates itself against only the handful of other birds around it. Multiply that by a thousand or a million and hey presto, one of the more remarkable behaviours to be found anywhere in the natural world.

Speaking of Starling roosts, I'm at Carsington at the weekend, not only will it be an Aren't Birds Brilliant event, we have Feed The Birds Day too(!). At the end of the day in the autumn/winter months there's a significant roost in a nearby village called Kirk Ireton, of upto 100,000 birds. No news on it yet this year, so perhaps I'll go have a look for myself.

Starling Roost!

There are few more common garden birds in Britain than the Starling, so what's to get excited about? Try a flock somewhere in the 100,000 range, twisting and contorting in unimaginable formations as they gather to their roost. They begin in the hundreds, a few different flocks scurrying from different directions, and this continues for fifteen minutes until you suddenly begin to realise they've become not flocks but waves, not of hundreds or thousands, but tens of thousands of individuals all following the same enormous plan - to stay in amidst the writhing torrent of birds until at some predestined or perhaps telepathic point they decide to land en masse, thus evading any dazzled predators patrolling the vicinity.
Some of them came down into trees just 10 or 15 yards away from us, dropping like stones, sounding almost like rifle fire.

Video 1 - Kirk Ireton Starling Roost
Video 2 - Kirk Ireton Starling Roost
Video 3 - Kirk Ireton Starling Roost
Video 4 - Kirk Ireton Starling Roost

I'd always wanted to view this spectacle and I'm really truly thrilled to have actually found it. It's peaceful like waves crashing along the shore, it's artistic - an animated, emoting sculpture across the whole sky, and above all it's just bloody big nature!
Alas it's not easy to photograph or video, especially with mid-range digital cameras, so here's Bill Oddie's memorable version filmed for his BBC series. Well worth a view any day of the week.

Of course with these numbers of birds flying overhead, there's always likely to be one drawback.