murmuration of starlings – From Pyrenees to Pennines

Just a Few Steps from Home …

This week, for Monochrome Madness, Leanne asks us to stay in our home patch and show us what we can find within 10 km of our home. Well. I’m sorry Leanne, but frankly, one kilometre is as far as I can stretch today, and I may not even go that far. Let’s see. Have you met our next door neighbours? They’re in the featured photo.

We’re a bit light on neighbours generally. You might find these characters:

They’re from the local ponds – quite honestly the heron and egret come from just a little further up the road- but not much more distant.

Even nearer than the ponds is the River Ure.

Go the other way from the house, and it’s fields and crops…

… and more sheep …

But please don’t think our life lacks drama. On Monday evening we were unexpectedly treated to a starling murmuration at the bottom of the garden. At dusk, starlings in their hundreds – perhaps thousands – swirled above us, eddying back and forth, cacophanously landing as one on the trees, which bowed under their weight, before they took off again to wheel and turn above us. Then some signal, known only to them, indicated that they should disappear and roost in the nearby reed beds. They never seem to come to the same place twice, so they weren’t here on Tuesday, and they won’t come tonight.

This is just as the shot emerged from the camera – a natural monochrome.

So that was our drama for the week. Just an everyday story of country folk.

Snapshot Saturday: a murmuration of starlings

Last Monday, towards evening, the place to be was our home. We dashed from window to window, watching as dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of starlings descended on the trees round our house. They weighed down the branches, then in coordinated waves – responding to some urge we could not understand – they swept skywards, tearing across the garden, swooping, diving, before briefly settling again to repeat the performance again and again for a whole three-quarters of an hour, before finally disappearing to settle near the river for the night.

So near to our house, those mesmerising formations of groups of birds twisting and turning in harmony, as if in some graceful aerial dance weren’t so apparent as they are at a distance. We were rewarded instead by seeing them at close quarters, rising, landing and rising again from the trees near our house.

A murmuration of starlings, especially for us.

Our car didn’t enjoy the display quite so much.

These photos are for this week’s WordPress photo challenge, Favourite Place. Click on any image to view full size

A murmuration of starlings

The bush telegraph was busy. It’s that time of year, and starlings are murmurating. Spotted south of Ripon, they’d also been seen at Nosterfield, only a couple of miles from us.

Sunset over Nosterfield Nature Reserve.

Down at the nature reserve, just at sunset, cars gathered. Their occupants waited, enjoying the spectacle of the nightly sunset. Then most of the cars just – went. What did they know that we didn’t? Then Malcolm spotted what we’d come to see, over there in the north.

The starlings gather.

Thousands upon thousands of starlings in a dense cloud that spread, re-gathered, swooped, dived and soared like one of those unending computer-graphic screen savers that used to be all the rage.

We left too, We needed to be nearer. And sure enough, there in a lay-by near Nosterfield village we re-grouped, our binoculars to the ready. The starlings formed an immense cloud, sometimes dispersing to blend in with the grey cloud behind, sometimes wheeling together in sinuous black streaks of snake-like movement. For half an hour we watched.