The starling cannot be any body's favourite bird, and yet, when you see them in huge flocks not merely in hundreds, but thousands wheeling, dipping, rising, coordinated to a hairs breadth it seems, they make one of the most impressive sights in all bird life. So it was one afternoon recently in a back road in Meath.
About four o'clock, a hugh squadron of them descended on a row of road side trees. Large old trees, sycamore and ash, mostly.
Two trees near a pair of evening strollers were in a few minutes covered with more birds than they had earlier in the season been covered with leaves. It was not so much a loud chatter they sent up, more a resounding screech. Suddenly all went silent. Why? Five seconds later it was seen that another large contingent was arriving. Huge numbers of birds moved up into the right hand of the two trees,
This went on several times until it became clear that more birds were arriving to the left, and soon four or five trees were covered in such living foliage.
You could count, wildly, as each new flock came wheeling and undulating in, that so many hundreds had arrived with each temporary hush. Perhaps they were migrating. David Cabot tells us in his pocket book of Irish Birds, that during autumn, there is a large in flux of them from Scandinavia, Holland, Poland, North Britain and North Germany. Maybe late arrivals?
Cars went by regularly underneath, with not a flap from them. Suddenly, the sky above the two watchers was dark with them as they took off, a huge cloud with rifts here and there.
Lord Grey of Fallodon writes of the evening flight over their chosen roosting place "a vast globe, it may be, of some thousands of birds.
They fly close together, and there are many evolutions and swift turns, yet there is no collision the impulse to each quick movement or change of direction seems to seize every bird simultaneously. It is as if, for the time being, each bird had ceased to be a separate unity and had become a part of one sentient whole ... one impulse or one will affecting them all at the same moment.
"That's out on the land. Not always appreciated in the cities where they splash every building they choose, as if with smelly whitewash.