Late Stage Starlingism

 

Though the light had grown dimmer, there was still plenty of time before sunset. I went down to the sea at a leisurely pace. Often it’s a rush to get the last scrap of day before the sun goes down and the starlings go in to roost. But today I could take it easy. I saw some early, smaller murmurations at the old pier, teardrop shapes in the distance smudging the horizon. Very inconspicuous, from a distance it's a nonchalant natural phenomenon. 

I think about what other people make of the starlings as they go about their sunset experience. For some, it will be a sprinkle of unexpected interest added to the general dusky romance, rather than the main focus it is for me. I think about why the starlings amass around the cold, old pier before moving on to the warm, new one. It’s a quibble in the wider mystery of these nightly congregations. 

I wonder what difference the weather will make to the flavour of the murmurations. It’s windy today, clear but a little hazy. I’ve become attuned to the habits of the sunset here. I know now how rare it is to actually see the moment the sun goes below the horizon. There’s usually a cloudbank that gathers to spoil the party. And today was no different. A layer of misty cloud made a premature horizon for the sun. It seemed to set in midair. And so, before the official setting time, we were left with a sunless sky. 

I toyed with the idea of sitting on the beach and watching the starlings from there but it was too cold and windy. I needed to keep on the move. I saw a cameraman fall over and drop his equipment as he was backing away from the high tossed waves. I was the closest person to him. I couldn’t think of anything useful to say, so I didn’t say anything. Maybe I should've just acknowledged the fall in some way? He quickly rearranged himself and seemed fine. Someone was shouting something from the pier. For a moment I thought they knew me. Or they might have been shouting something unhelpful to the fallen cameraman, like “timber!”. 

I made my way along the pier to get close to the birds and perhaps take advantage of a bit of shelter. A feeling I’ve had more than once when going to see the starlings is that I’m so cold I want to cry. Sometimes this mingles with the emotional hit of seeing thousands of birds twisting and turning as one and I’m not quite sure what it actually is that’s making me cry. At least once it’s been very entangled with how the motion the starlings make is such a profound reference to the waves below them. And when the birds come so close you can hear the whoosh, it sounds like the waves crashing in a way that mirrors the alignment of the movements. 

There’s a very resounding, symphonic impression of everything in motion together. The white noise of the wind and the waves, the white spray of the breakers that reach down as far as the arcade on the pier. There’s a resonance of meaning. There’s the salt of the sea whipped into your eyes to mingle with the tears. It all gets rather interconnected, the different senses bleeding into each other to form an undifferentiated assault of cold, wet nature.