Winter is coming, and that means that millions of starlings are on the move, from the deep cold of Continental Europe to the relative mildness of Britain’s winters. We are surrounded by the sea, which buffers the temperatures reducing the cold in the depths of winter. They join our resident starlings to roughly double the population in winter, according the the RSPB.
A starling is nothing that special individually, but in winter they roost communally in reedbeds1 these days. They group together in massive billowing clouds called murmurations2, this is thought to be trying to confuse birds of prey, who can’t home in on individual birds.
The unquiet sound of massed starlings
Once they’ve settled in for a while a massive racket starts to built up, this is a binaural recording best on headphones. The slight dread at 4:30 is when a bird of prey came along, it silenced the starlings closest to me but most of the roost was still rapping away to each other.
I managed to get myself to within fifty yards of one of their roosts on Ham Wall, in the Avalon Marshes complex of nature reserves, sited on only peat extractions. Although the starlings tend to roost somewhere on the reserves, which site they favour varies from day to day. When you’re that close to the roost, you get to hear the damnedest noise from these guys. A starling roost is not a peaceful place – they charge around low in the reedbeds, and as the day gave way to twilight I saw a bird of prey strafe in low over the water, though I couldn’t make out whether it won its supper for the night.
It was a slight challenge to stand my ground as I was buzzed by wave upon wave of birds incoming on all points very low. They didn’t go for me, although The Birds3 movie did come to mind.
Some tips if you are going to visit a starling roost
- Choose a still day, the starlings take more time about their murmurations if they don’t have to fight the wind or rain
- Go early in the season – November or December. The season persists often through to March, but starling shit is a pretty noxious smell. The hum builds up to an acrid stench as time passes
- For the same reason, keep your mouth closed if you look up at phalanxes of starlings passing overhead 😉
- Go on a weekday – fewer people and dogs with all that goes with that…
- Avalon Marshes has a Starling Hotline 07866 554142 that tells you where the birds roosted last night. That doesn’t tell you where they will be tonight, but it lifts the odds. It’s a dead cert if you fancy the early morning sight when they leave, however.
- Take a torch. It’s very dark when the birds pack it in, and the cold comes as the sun goes down.
- In the early parts of the 20th century when the starling population was much higher and we hadn’t killed off most of the insect population they had massive urban roosts in London. ↩
- You can find a roost near to you on the Starlings in the UK site to see murmurations for yourself ↩
- Hitchcock could have done very well with the electric, eerie sound of starlings, but he synthesised the soundtrack using a Trautonium. ↩
I wouldn’t fancy living next to that little lot! Interestingly the starlings website suggests a location quite close to me so I’ll take a walk down there and have a look. I’ve seen them in Pembrokeshire in the past when we were there on holiday during October half-term.
I like the look of the Trautonium and a “Mixtur-Trautonium” is certainly on my Christmas list. The Wikipedia entry suggests that it’s quite hard to play, I wonder if that’s due to the difficulty of setting up the oscillators to give a tuneful output? The user interface for playing the thing seems to be quite simple and should be familiar to a stringed instrument player.