Six Things, Volume 40

Starlings | Ostrich | There’dn’t’ve | Stop | Scale | Metro

Oct 21, 2023

Starlings have been on my mind recently, not least because murmuration season will soon enough be on us, but also prompted by an endearing gathering of a hundred or so on the tower of our local church – not so much a ‘murmuration’ – a specific word for those extraordinary gatherings that swoop and billow and beguile – as a ‘restlessness’ of starlings, because that’s their dominant theme.

Twenty or so find their perch, then in come a dozen more. Disruptors, assembling themselves alongside them. Five fly up, tetchy, do a lap, settle somewhere else, disturbing another group.

Budge up. Budge up.

No, you budge up.

Here first.

Don’t care.

OK, I’m off. Who’s in?

Me. Me. Me. Me. Me.

They set each other off, barely a still moment between them. A constant rippling wave of bird.

In the end they settle, their physical restlessness replaced by relentless chat, a mess of clicks and whistles and buzzes and low-level jabber.

ooh he never did oh yes whatever yes ooh mate really come off it she said what? I couldn’t you what now? nice one isn’t it? didn’t think so that’s what she said never having it would you no way! she couldn’t but then he turned round and why not saw it myself couldn’t believe it just yesterday over there and then did you really but could he silly old git never knew what she saw in him I don’t think so do you mind?

1×

0:00

-0:59

And then, just as you think they’ve finally settled, up they get in a loose group, do a fly around – their fluid cohesion governed by mathematics way beyond my feeble reckoning, but definitely governed by something, I’m sure of it.

Sometimes they don’t billow, don’t wave. Sometimes they fly with purpose.

I have a memory – five, eight, twelve years old, it doesn’t matter.

A group of starlings – fifty, I reckon – flying directly over my head. Fast, united, purposeful. As I look up, a double-voiced screech, and two squabbling birds spill out below and behind the group like a pub brawl onto the pavement. They fall as one, a bickering bundle of grudge. And then some instinct tells them – either individually or together, birds are mysterious creatures – to snap out of it. The pavement, after all, is hard, just down there, and coming up towards them at a rate. All differences instantly forgotten.

Shit, we were flying somewhere. GUYS! GUYS! WAIT UP!

These gatherings – large, small, it doesn’t matter – are the very stuff of life. The high street without them is fine enough. With them – oh yes. Yes indeed. Just a few seconds. Improve your day.

I spent years, decades, not noticing. How careless, how ruinously inattentive to the things that hold us together in good times and bad. So, almost as if making up for lost time, now I notice obsessively. That thing, the shape of it. The colour. The lines. The shadows. LOOK AT THIS PAVING SLAB.

Stop. Notice.

Extra Starlthings Starling Things

There is science behind murmurations. I knew it.

There are hundreds of films of murmurations out there. I like this one: The Starling and Falcon Dance

Hot murmurating starlings in your area.

Murmurations shmurmurations. What about the mimicry?

They’re not the only ones, of course – I wrote about bird mimicry in general back in Volume 11 – but they’re probably the ones you’re most likely to encounter when out and about in your local area, and their prowess in that department is almost uncanny.

Buzzard? Nope, starling.

Goldfinch? Nope, starling.

Your neighbour’s microwave? Nope, starling.

We’re not the only ones to pass stories down from generation to generation. (There are, as always, quite a few links in this post, but if I had to say ‘only click on this one’, I’d say ‘only click on this one’.)

If that’s not enough starlingery for you, the excellent Chloe Hope wrote beautifully about them on her Substack Death and Birds. If you’re not already a subscriber, do remedy that situation.

Thing 2 – Ostrich

I gave a talk the other day in which I made the connection between the first bird – Archaeopteryx lithographica – and the film Top Gun: Maverick. A story, perhaps, for another day.

Anyway, as part of it I presented the smallest bird in the world, the Bee Hummingbird (five and a half centimetres long, less than half the weight of a 20p piece) alongside the largest bird in the world, the Common Ostrich (2.8 metres high, and weighing the equivalent of 10,834 two-pound coins).

The weight of birds is always – ALWAYS – expressed in terms of coinage.

It put me in mind of many things – not least the wonderful diversity of birds, and how things like the hummingbird and the ostrich are straining at the very limits of what it means to be one.

Take the Bee Hummingbird. Endemic to Cuba, these (so I’m told by those who have seen them) can resemble insects as much as birds.

Ostriches, meanwhile… well, I’m not sure what they resemble as much as birds, but if you saw one for the first time you wouldn’t necessarily think they were in any way related to their counterpart at the other end of the avian size spectrum.

Anyway, another thing it put me in mind of was this valuable infographic by XKCD, aka Randall Munroe.

Thing 3 – There’dn’t’ve

Why don’t we say “there’dn’t’ve”?

Tom Scott, as so often, is on hand to tell us.

Fans of linguistic-y type stuff will also want to discover the very fine Lingthusiasm podcast.

Thing 4 – Stop

A high concept video, this. To qualify for inclusion, a song must meet two criteria:

It must include the word ‘STOP’
At the mention of the word ‘STOP’, the music must – however briefly – stop.

You might want to keep a notepad handy to jot down the songs you really like, so you can come back to them.

Thing 5 – Scale

An old one, but there’s no harm in that. It’s entirely possible there are people out there who haven’t seen it, and even for those of us who have (many times) its charm and simplicity make it worth a rewatch.

Thing 6 – Metro

Oh god this is terrible. I mean, it’s brilliant, obviously. But also awful.

Simply name all the tube stations in London from memory.

There goes the weekend.

Six Things