Big picture: Starlings, by Paolo Patrizi

Rome in winter, shortly before dusk, means one thing: wheeling, elegant flocks of starlings – murmurations – performing extraordinary aerial ballets that, from a distance, look like ink smudges. → Photograph: Paolo Patrizi

The birds gather before sunset after commuting back to the city from a day’s foraging for olives and insects in the countryside. They prefer the city by night as it’s warmer, with fewer predators. Swooping and turning at sharp speeds, the flocks – dense in the centre, like the eye of a storm – shift shape in a heartbeat. → Photograph: Paolo Patrizi

Experts have long debated how, and more importantly why, starlings behave this way. When the flock is attacked by birds such as hawks or peregrine falcons, the collective protects the individual by spreading apart and regrouping quickly afterwards. The greater the number of birds, the easier it is for them to form a more compact, cohesive group to protect against these enemies. → Photograph: Paolo Patrizi

Researchers in Italy have also discovered that starlings are particularly socially minded: they switch place in the flock, taking turns to be at the more vulnerable front, sides and back, sharing the risk of being picked off by birds of prey. → Photograph: Paolo Patrizi

Studies into starling behaviour have found that it may even be similar to human herding instincts, particularly on occasions when a group is under threat. And that certainly seems true of Romans, because, for all their beauty, these flocks are reviled by all those who live in the Eternal City. → Photograph: Paolo Patrizi

They shower the streets with noxious, corrosive droppings, coating cars, cobblestones and the city’s ancient buildings and statues. Anti-starling brigades – the Lega Italiana Protezione Uccelli, dressed in protective white suits and face masks – are dispatched with megaphones to sound distress calls designed to frighten the birds away to the country or the city’s larger parks. Photograph: Paolo Patrizi