Featured on: The Bovey Birder, 22/02/2025
Link: https://theboveybirder.com/2025/02/22/shapwick-starlings/

About a month ago, we visited the Shapwick Heath National Nature Reserve starling roost to round off an incredible birthday birding weekend. The highlight of the evening was the murmuration that unfolded before our eyes, a dancing, twisting, mesmerisingly beautiful cloudy mass of birds. There was quite a crowd there too; keen birdwatchers, photographers and filmmakers, families and many others. There must have been at least 200 people lined up along that one stretch of path, craning their necks to get a glimpse of the spectacle. It’s incredible how a natural phenomenon can bring people together like that.

As for the murmuration itself, well it defies belief really doesn’t it? There must have been just shy of 100,000 birds in that one flock, all magically connected by an invisible thread formed by evolution and the need for community. The shape started off small, but steadily began to grow in both size and confidence. The flock was small at the start, almost half-heartedly going through the movements, as if warming up. But as more birds began to arrive, in little groups ranging from a dozen to 70 or 80, the power of the wave soon began to take hold. The noise, when the murmuration came closer, was like that of a blowing gale. Thousands of wings, beating the same rhythmic pulse. I’m honoured to have been able to witness and experience such a thing.

It’s incredible to think, really, that a birds everyday life always seems unremarkable and common, is actually anything but. Such a happening in the human world would take more planning than I’m willing to go through at this moment in time. Just imagine it. You’d need 100,000 people, and a way for them to not bump into each other. You’d need to find a method of getting them to move as one mega-organism, which, short of implanting a futuristic control chip in all their minds, I don’t think would be physically possible.

But the Starlings, they just show up on the day and do it. No planning, no practise, and no convincing others to come and join in (unlike humans). Nonchalantly, they just fly to the site and get on with it. Forming this twirling, swirling, physics-defying spectacle is just something that happens, part of everyday life for them, in the winter at least anyway. And who knows, maybe science will soon reveal a social aspect forming part of the need to murmurate. I mean, we know that it is in order to roost communally and adhere to that age-old natural law, safety in numbers, but maybe it could be something more? Like meeting up with friends or family? Call me crazy, but that’s how I like to imagine it!

Such a thing is why we have expressions in the English language like ‘my breath caught in my throat’ and ‘my heart skipped a beat’. This is the kind of beauty that can’t be replicated in a man-made form. It is the sort of thing where beauty is found in the fact that we know so little about it, and its easier just to stare and let your jaw drop in awe. On that bitterly cold night, I felt an unimaginable amount of different things, washing over me in rapidly occurring waves. Joy, confusion, anxiety, curiosity. But the backstop behind it all never ceased to be a sense of awe. I’d never really felt anything like it, to be honest. And it felt good.

All of a sudden, in the blink of an eye every last bird had disappeared, dropping into the reeds to finally commence their communal roost. It definitely seemed a little anticlimactic, after such an inspiring, breathtaking performance on the Shapwick stage. Immediately it struck me as mind-boggling how near on 100,000 birds had all vanished into that one stretch of reedbed. It was like a magic trick, just another part of the wonder of the murmuration.

So, what do we actually know about the murmurations? There is little in the form of rock-hard facts when it comes to researching this natural phenomenon, but one thing that’s for certain is that they all happen at around the same time of day, up and down the country, and that’s in the evening as the sun goes down. Another thing we know is that it always coincides with a communal roost, whether that be beneath a pier, such as in Blackpool, or within a reedbed, like here at Shapwick Heath NNR.

The community angle is a good one to take, as a lot of it just makes sense. The more birds there are together, the more body heat and warmth there is, and obviously then there’s safety in numbers. If you’re a Starling, you’re going to want to be at a sizeable roost because then if a fox or marten was to come along, you’d be less likely to become an evening snack. Some scientists even think that the murmuration is a way of attracting more birds to the roost, to add to the current flock’s numbers. So that’s one theory to explain the murmuration, and I think it actually does make a lot of sense, from an evolutionary point of view.

Another theory is that the murmuration is completely for show, and is an intimidation tactic used to frighten off any potential predators that might be lurking around the roost site. If you don’t know what you’re actually looking at, a murmuration can be both unnerving and startling. If this were to be true however, it clearly doesn’t always work as some of the most breathtaking murmurations happen when a bird of prey like a Peregrine Falcon darts through and splits the murmuration in two, trying to pick off a single bird.

Murmurations have certainly left their mark on the history books, as well as touching the lives of people in the modern world too. The Ancient Romans believed that the undulating patterns created by the Starlings mirrored the changing moods of their many gods. Roman religious leaders, known as augurs or diviners, interpreted the shapes created by the birds to make major decisions, about such crucial things like key battles and political debates. They were a way of seeing whether the gods approved of the idea or not. This was known as ‘taking the auspices’. So there you have it. Starlings even spoke for the Roman gods!

As I have already mentioned a ridiculous amount of times in this blog, such is my admiration for them, a starling murmuration is one of nature’s greatest spectacles and a truly breathtaking sight. I feel incredibly honoured and privileged to have seen such a phenomenon, that is as of yet unexplained by science. I have written two previous posts detailing them, so if you want to have a read of those too click here or here. To watch a video of the murmuration, visit my instagram account (@the_bovey_birder).