Stunning starlings are farmers’ friends
How man has always coveted the power of flight. Famously, during the reign of James IV, Italian courtier John Damian, having glued feathers to his arms, attempted to fly from the battlements of Stirling Castle. He failed, ending up in a dung heap … fallen from grace!
Whilst we may ridicule this attempt to emulate birds, there are still those who try to fly as witness the efforts of a number of flight theorists who leap annually from a pier in the south of England. Of course, there are now intrepid adventurers who wear special suits and jet-propelled engines who actually succeed in mastering the air. One recently crossed the English Channel thus!
My own view is that mankind is meant to remain on terra firma, for no matter how ingenious we may be, we will never master the air in the way of birds. The birds themselves demonstrate so well how flight has evolved. Some excel like the peregrine falcon, the fastest bird there is, capable of topping 200mph in the stoop, a truly amazing sight to see.
I well recall seeing one such falcon set off from just above me on the steep wall of a glen and remember watching it as it homed in on a small flight of woodpigeons, accelerating spectacularly as it sped through the glen. Travelling at somewhere near 200mph, it picked out a single victim, which it struck on the back of the head and the bird was instantly dead, tumbling to the floor of the glen closely followed by the assailant.
All manner of birds demonstrate a remarkable variety of flight styles, some fast, some slow, from the almost ponderous flight of the minuscule wren to the measured flight of the heron, alluded to last week, whose progress may be described as stately and rhythmic. In contrast, the sparrows feasting on my bird table together with the finches are in and out, zooming hither and thither, albeit not with the verve of the swallows of summer now wintering in the southern half of Africa.
Swallows provide us with a demonstration of real flying panache every summer and I never tire of watching them. The screaming swifts also give us plenty of speed and verve as do the sparrowhawks which, however, seem unable to sustain fast flight for long.
I watched a meadow pipit a couple of summers ago, completely outwit a hawk, dodging this way and that to avoid successive strikes until the hawk simply gave up. Hawks operate more successfully by stealth.
We admire the skills of the pilots of the Red Arrows as they fly their airplanes in a variety of formations but just watch the birds flying in their flocks. They are flying under their own steam and show how well their formations are kept together. Take the geese that come to us every winter, their skeins as they fly hundreds of miles across the North Atlantic, only change periodically as senior birds share the burden of pathfinding.
Swans and gulls follow similar flight patterns and particularly amazing are the flocks of waders, such as knot, that fly in remarkably closeorder and create marvellous patterns across the sky as a result.
However, the real artists at combined flying are undoubtedly starlings with their remarkable mumurations. People travel great distances to get a sight of such phenomena and are well rewarded when thousands, if not millions of birds get together and perform. Hereabouts, we don’t get the large murmurations they get around Gretna in the Borders but the other day I sat in a supermarket car-park and watched what I might call a ‘whisperation’ of about a dozen starlings careering around the sky above as if there were no tomorrow.
I have watched many similar events and tried to puzzle out the motivation behind them. The more I watch, the more I am convinced that the driving force behind these extraordinary events is sheer fun. There is surely no other explanation for there is no pattern, no apparent direction to these hurtling demonstrations, no apparent reason; they zoom here and there completely at random.
They could be demonstrating their collective skill as a means of confusing potential predators, except that I never see a predator anywhere near them. There could even be within each racing flock, a desire to impress. I simply cannot work it out. There isn’t even a single bird leading these headlong charges for the leadership changes frequently.
Such events inevitably attract the attention of behavioural scientists who also don’t seem to know what to make of them. I’ve read that each bird has its own little space which, in relation to the birds ahead, behind, to the side, above and below, is retained. But as far as I can ascertain no one can properly explain this behavioural trait! So, we will continue simply to admire the dynamism, discipline and sheer beauty of these events and continue to speculate about their origin.
Starting from those dozen birds I watched zooming over that supermarket car park and going from that to the millions of birds that get together to form those gigantic murmurations seems an amazing contrast and there is nothing quite to match the larger gatherings which paint the most artistic patterns in the sky.
Whatever the motivation, I regard this aspect of starling behaviour as a wonder of the natural world, especially when they come together in their millions, creating wonderful instantaneous works of art in the sky, sometimes like smoke wafted this way and that by some capricious wind.
Yet even in miniature, with only a dozen birds or so, their hurtling presence asks questions I certainly can’t answer.
What a contrast between the apparent discipline required for that formation flying and the absolute indiscipline shown by individual starlings when for instance, visiting a bird-table. Here, starlings show a preference for the fat balls and they do get in quite a lather when competing for space on them.
They swear at each other and they fight, often spiraling to the ground as they squabble.
There is absolutely no sign of the tight discipline they must all adhere to when conducting their amazing fly pasts.
And if you think of starlings as ‘common or garden birds, then think again for if they were not so common, we would admire them for their plumage, iridescent green with an attractive medley of white spots.
When it comes to the breeding season, starlings are quite cunning in so far as the hen bird will often lay eggs in the nests of other starlings.
Not exactly cuckoo-like but clearly determined to spread her own genes as far and wide as possible.
A long yellow bill indicates that, notwithstanding a pretty catholic diet, the starling is a dab hand at digging and probing for buried insect life. In that respect it is very much a farmer’s friend.