I am writing this post retrospectively because I got a bit behind posting whilst getting distracted travelling to Belfast etc. but I am here now in the garage of somebody else and have a few hours each evening where I have been able to read. I am part way through reading Waterland by Graham Swift, a copy which my friend lent me before Christmas - slow reader. Published in 1983 this personal narrative is set in the context of a wider history, of the narrator's family, the Fens of East Anglia (the same fens I were surrounded by growing up), and the eel. I am going to watch the film adaption tonight. Yesterday I watched a film comprised of archival footage which explored the cultural geography of the fens. The film is by Rowan Jaines who describes her film as one that aims to show the Fens as haunted by both the past and those things that have not yet come to be. The opening shot is of a murmuration of starlings over a low-lit fenland. Murmurations have always fascinated me because of their mystifying scale and coordination. I have tried to find out a bit more to un-envelope the mysteries of starlings.
Starling
- a murmuration is a word used only to describe the movement of starlings
million birds soar into the city and the sky would almost go dark
- fluttering
- a flock of up to a million swirl over their roost sites before settling down
each bird is less likely to be preyed upon if its part of a large group and signpost to other starlings the best place to roost for the night
- from a distance they look black but up close they are green and gleam with purple iridescence, in winter they are spangled with a constellation of white spots, the stars which give rise to their name - starling
- in autumn, vast numbers of continental starlings migrate to the UK to take advantage of the warmer winters and gather at dusk to roost in trees, bushes and reed beds
- they look like iron filings in the sky / crystal alignment
the birds see the direction of their neighbour and then steer their orientation to mimic, the alignment doesn't have a range, it is irrespective of the distance between neighbours
- the birds see a patchwork of light and dark, made up of the pale sky and dark birds and the birds fly towards the edges of the black and white boundary within their vision - they seek out the edges
- print out picture of murmurations, punch out the pattern, put through a music box
- murmuration is an onoematapaeae
- the sky is filled with tiny little apostrophes
- originally the birds were from Scandinavia and northern Europe and they have escaped the colder climate
- sleeping all together in the reeds keeps them warm
- the sound of their wings resembles sighing, a subtle hissing
- what do they do overnight? little bit of sleeping, little bit of dozing.. little bit of feather care prehaps
- starlings are imitators, they have a huge range of sounds that they can make with their pharynx so as well as making their bird like sounds they can also make guttural clicks and almost mechanical like sounds.
- they don't have their own natural songs, so what they tend to do is pull from everything they hear around them
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