Animal of the Week, February 18 2013 -- Go while you can

A starling, Philip Heron wikimedia commons

This week's animal, Sturnus vulgaris (European starling), is responsible for one of the most spectacular sights of winter, nay of any time of the year: a murmuration. This is when large flocks gather over popular winter roosting sites and put on fantastic aerial displays, with thousands of birds shifting like clouds of smoke, coalescing in tight balls, and then stringing themselves out across the sky, all happening in the blink of an eye seemingly unpredictably.

Testimony to the wonder of such an event, last year an amazing video of a murmuration went viral on the internet. Although you don't have to be paddling a canoe along a country river in the rain to witness one. This weekend I went to see if one would happen in Brighton, and it did, right over the pier, with the sounds of Jamiroquai and the arcade games in the background, I stood mesmerised by the gathering, certainly not as big as the one those girls saw, it was nonetheless a wonderful sight as the sun set with the birds swarming overhead; it was worth putting up with Jamiroquai (muted on my shitty video below; I'm so good to you). In the UK murmuations happen from November to February, so you've a week or so left with a chance to witness this most wonderful vision. Or wait until next year.

Starlings over Brighton, all the dots are starlings

In winter, birds escaping the harsh continental winter swell the numbers of starlings in this country, with our relatively benign, mild climate. These birds gather to benefit from communal warmth and safety in numbers. Small flocks begin to gather around the roosts before dusk, with groups of five, ten, or twenty birds amassing into ever larger aggregations. The largest murmurations can involve millions of birds, but a gathering of a hundred or so birds is mesmerising.

Why starlings form these amazing spectacles is a matter of debate, they probably help to deter predators: any falcon trying to snatch a bird would have to pick one out of large group, and then, thousands of pairs of eyes are better than one. It's thought the individual members of the flock keep track of their six or seven closest neighbours and move with them, vagaries in the distances between the birds mean that the "closest neighbours" can change very rapidly after periods of stasis, leading to the stunning sudden changes in the conformation of the flocks. And if you're a starling, you'd begin evasive behaviour any time one of your seven closest neighbours did -- and that allows the flock to respond rapidly to threats.

Starlings against the Brighton sunset

Perhaps overfamiliar, we often overlook starlings, but they have always been one of my favourite birds. From a distance, dark, drab, and too common to be worthy of inspection, but up close their irridescent green and purple spotted plumage is quite beautiful. Their unmelodic vocalisations warrant further attention too, as they are incredibly complex, a series of whistles, clicks, and mechanical whirrs.

European starlings were one of the bird species introduced to North America by the American Acclimatisation Society. The society sought to bring some familiar European animals to help brighten up the parks and gardens of the USA. While the pheasants and chaffinches didn't really take, the hundred or so starlings released into Central Park took flight, now more than 200 million birds have colonised  North America from Canada to Mexico. And murmurations can be seen across the pond too.