MEET THE FLOCKERS

Murmuration is one of the most beautiful – and least understood – natural behaviours Søren Solkaer is a Danish portrait photographer specialising in film and music personalities, but in his spare time he has always had a fascination for photographing the mass migration of the common starling – Sturnus vulgaris. “The phenomenon leans itself towards moving images as it is an organic progression of shapes in an endless flux,” says Solkaer. “I found, however, that a lot of the images that appear on the sky are so fleeting, like life itself, and were only possible to capture on stills.” Solkaer has been photographing murmurations – a collective noun for starlings specifically – for four years, with the last two spent following their migration paths from southern Europe to Denmark as they fly north to the Arctic circle. According to Leah Tsang, ornithologist at the Australian Museum, birds flock for “group communication, and predator confusion”; while starlings are not in this profusion in Australia, budgerigars gather in the north in groups ranging from a few hundred to millions. Solkaer took more than 100,000 photos of the phenomenon; 109 are collected in Black Sun: a book and an exhibition travelling globally in 2021, including to Nandahobbs gallery in Sydney.