I give you the Starling, one of my favorite birds. Not only is it beautifully patterned (look closely to notice the fantastic combination of purples and greens overlaid with striking white spots that give it an iridescence), it's also a great mimic (car alarms and mobile phone tunes a speciality). Most amazing of all is it's habit of murmuration at dusk, when hundreds of thousands and sometimes over a million starlings cluster together to put on the most breath-taking of formation flying displays. The patterns they create are truly astonishing. A murmuration has to be seen to be believed. The photograph below of such a display below doesn't do it justice. You have to be there live and in 3D to get the full awesomeness of what these little birds serve up. Clever starlings. They are much-maligned for being noisy and dirty but I think they are wonderful. Mozart kept one as a pet. Debate over.
This week's poem is freshly-written (ink still drying even now). I hope you like it.
Starlings As light begins to drain at fade of day, early arrivals for the main event settle noisily on telephone wires, the empty cages of a ferris wheel and every eave that offers roosting space. A rowdy flash crowd is gathering for their special aerial display, each individual an irridescent sheen of violet and emerald green with striking spotwork scintillating in the slanting sun.
Hundreds become thousands upon thousands as flocks pour in dense as locust swarms from all points of the compass. Finally, with no surface left on which to perch, as if a critical mass is reached, in chain-reaction all the resting birds peel off into the air to join formation with the feathery throng surely a million strong (if one could count) already twisting in a smoke-like cloud across the darkening sky.
This is a murmuration, one of the wonders of the avian world, a sodality of starlings shoal-like in pulsating, gyroscopic dance. They twist, they turn, they swoop as one with consummately choreographed aplomb, throwing fantastic shapes against the sky, sometimes so dense they blot the sun, at others fragmenting into skeins pulled thin only to morph and coalesce again in beautiful, breath-taking flypast.
They cast their spell as long as light remains, then with one final spiral flourish drop like unstuck pixels out of sight. Thanks for reading. Have a good week, S :-) Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to Facebook
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