A starling murmuration

Text 1: Fifty Thousand, by Leah Brannigan

An original contemporary article.

They come in from every direction at once, about half an hour before dusk: loose groups of twenty or thirty at first, then flocks of hundreds, flying low over the reed beds, until the whole sky above the marsh is filling up with birds like a sink filling with water. I have stood on this embankment every November for nine years. I still feel my breath catch.

And then, without any signal that a human could detect, they become one thing. Fifty thousand starlings, perhaps more, lift into a single dark cloud and begin to move. It stretches into a long ribbon, folds over on itself, swells into a sphere, thins at one end into a funnel and pours itself across the sky like smoke poured from one bottle into another. The edges ripple. The centre darkens and pales and darkens again, as if the whole flock were breathing. And all of it in near silence, apart from a soft rushing, like wind through a field of barley.

Scientists have studied this. I have read the papers. Each bird, it seems, watches only its seven nearest neighbours, and adjusts its flight to theirs, and from that simple rule, repeated fifty thousand times over, comes this impossible, shifting sculpture. I find the explanation beautiful. I also find that it explains nothing at all about what it feels like to stand underneath it.

Tonight a sparrowhawk arrived. I saw it first as a dark dot slicing in from the west, and the flock saw it at the same instant. The whole mass recoiled, split, opened a hole in itself around the hawk like a pupil contracting from a light, and closed again behind it, empty-handed. Somebody near me cheered.

Then, as the light failed, the cloud began to pour itself down into the reeds, a vast black hourglass emptying, until the sky was clear and grey and ordinary, and the reed bed below seethed and chattered with invisible birds. I walked back to the car in the dark, feeling oddly bereaved, as though a great voice had just stopped speaking.

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