Some of the starlings that dance around Brighton Pier at dusk spend their days on the rooftops above my garden. They whoop and whistle atop television aerials and chimney stacks, fly about a bit. Then, a couple of hours before sunset, they become noisier. They seem to call to each other, egg each other on like friends texting before a night out. Impatiently, little groups fly from TV aerial to TV aerial, one or two slowly building up to six or seven. The whistles and clicks become louder, the flights become bolder; swifter somehow, as more join and the momentum builds, as they impatiently wait to get going. Then, suddenly, they’re gone - whoosh - to the Pier. Each little gang from Brighton and Hove’s many rooftops and TV aerials, joining together for the big dance in the sky.
If you walk along the beach before sunset you can see them on their way. Their dark bodies bounce like charged telecom wires, shadowing across seafront buildings in the fading light. On the journey of two miles or so, the starlings join together, meeting other gangs from other rooftops. Once, on my birthday, I was treated to a night in The Grand Hotel, made famous for the bombing during the Conservative Party conference in 1984; on the fifth floor our balcony was starling height, and we watched, champagne in hand, with the sun setting over The West Pier, as groups of 10 or 20 or 200 dashed to the party from all directions, calling and heckling to each other as they flew. Finally they came together in flocks of several thousand, moving through the sky in tremendous synchronised ribbons, contracting and expanding as one, a bigger more majestic being, a heartbeat pulsing above the city. If you stand on the Pier and shut out the noise of arcade games, you can hear the starlings whoosh past you, a million wings beating in symmetry like wind rustling the trees. Stand close enough and you feel the stormy blast generated by their bodies on your face. They roost in the bowels of the Pier, beneath your feet. They never shut up, chatting and clicking as they rest, while their friends keep on going, refusing to let go of the night.
This thing they do, this dancing, is called murmuration. And Brighton Pier is one of the best places in the country to see it. No one really knows what it is or why they do it (other birds don’t). Some scientists believe they do it to gain safety in numbers; to confuse predators before settling down to roost. Others think they gather to keep warm or exchange information. I don’t care why they do it - I’m just glad they do.
I’ve seen only three starlings in my garden. One was a baby and the other two its parents, teaching their young one to use the feeder. The three of them arrived with a gang of (slightly put out) house sparrows. I sat a couple of metres away in my deckchair, a cushion on my head serving as a hat to shield my eyes and laptop from the sun – it was enough to fool the birds into believing I wasn’t there. I watched as the baby clumsily grappled with the feeder, wings flapping, house sparrows tutting, parents on the fence looking the other way. Then the baby fell off the feeder and the three of them flew away, never to be seen again.
Starlings, like almost everything else, are declining (66% since the 1970s). No one really knows why, although a lack of food and nesting habitat are the most likely reasons. In rural areas, the loss of permanent pasture and increase in the rearing of livestock is likely, but it urban areas it could be the loss of green space, the paving and fake-turfing of gardens. Starlings love to eat leatherjackets, the larvae of craneflies or daddy longlegs, which are considered a pest to many: they eat plant roots and can damage crops and make lawns look unsightly. Potent chemicals are used on the soil to remove them, which removes the food source for starlings and probably poisons everything else in the process. Elsewhere the soil is just locked away, like my garden was before I took up the decking.
In my last garden I would watch female craneflies lay eggs in the lawn, their pointed ovipositors easily negotiating the hard turf, while blunt-ended males tumbled in the long grass. My Brighton lawn is barely three months old, but it’s lush and green and shaggy around the edges. I’ve already planted clover in it and I hope other “weeds” will seed into it in time. It will make a good home for leatherjackets, a good foraging ground for starlings. Anything to keep them dancing in the sky.
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Kate Bradbury gardens on a small patch of land in Brighton. She is the author of The Wildlife Gardener. Read the previous posts in this series here.
