In any other place a great white egret passing overhead would have commanded all our attention. The national breeding total for this species was just seven pairs in 2017. Here, however, at dusk it was an incidental detail, a stately white shape rowing quietly through the binoculars’ orbit, as we focused on something far more captivating.
It was a flock of starlings, which doesn’t sound impressive; until you attach a number to them. The recent reports cite a figure of 750,000. Yet in conversation with a volunteer from a neighbouring reserve we learned that this estimate doesn’t square with his own photographic evidence. He processes the images using software that can calculate dots on screens very accurately and his own counts suggest a total for the whole Somerset Levels of around 1.5 million.
Whichever figure is true, this roost of “shitlegs” is a wonder to behold, and for us the drama unfolded in several distinct phases. Initially we were entranced simply to see several thousand, spread evenly through the sky and moving in slow blizzard above the skeletal trees. The stillness of the winter wood, the chastening cold of dusk and the clanging notes of song thrushes at late choir were all part of the moment’s affecting mood. Then a sparrowhawk shot through and the loose flow tightened and folded upon itself, twisting and spiralling down, genie-like, into the mothering woods.
Wonderful, we thought – until thousands became tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and we were then struggling for words. They were birds reduced by distance and number to something like smoke in a long, slow globular unfolding that seemed as solid as the ground over which it flowed. There were such numbers as dreams are made of. Starlings turning like a tide; except that this tide flipped suddenly into itself to make a glorious nonsense of any metaphor. It was a kind of heaven in avian form. As we stood and watched we felt uplifted merely to be there, immersed in a susurration that is blended from 2 million small wings working as one at end of day.
