The Red Notebook

I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak
Nothing but ‘Mortimer,’ and give it him
To keep his anger still in motion.
     —Shakespeare, Henry IV, part 1

The other week, I came up with a frankly ridiculous hypothesis (I won’t dignify it with the description theory) about starlings [Sturnus vulgaris]. Ridiculous and fanciful though it undoubtedly is, I record it here, in the unlikely event that it turns out to be true, so that nobody else can take credit for thinking it up. It’s a priority issue:

A starling on my chimney pot

Starlings (or European starlings, to give them their international name, as we’re supposed to these days) are reasonably accomplished mimics. Not as accomplished, it must be said, as their close cousins the mynahs, but they have been known to imitate the sounds of other birds—and, indeed, man-made objects. As a child in the 70s, I well remember the local starlings’ occasionally imitating a neighbour’s Trimphone. In later years, as technology advanced, their descendants took to calling out like car alarms—a habit which seems to have died out as car alarms became more reliable, emitting false alarms much less frequently.

The collective noun for starlings is a murmuration. Indeed, when the birds congregate in the winter months and settle to roost, they do murmur incessantly to each other. But in amongst the murmurs, there are subdued snap, crackle and popping noises. The overall effect is uncannily like the noise made by Dr Frankenstein’s electrical apparatus just before he throws the master switch, or, less fancifully, a high-tension electrical transmission line.

Which is where my ridiculous hypothesis comes in. I am wondering whether the modern-day murmuration of starlings incorporates elements of electrical snap, crackle and pop, picked up by these semi-accomplished mimics as they gather for a murmur on electrical transmission lines.

No, I don’t think so either.

Around this time of year, on my daily drive home from work, I am sometimes lucky enough to see one of Britain’s natural wonders: flocks of starlings wheeling in the sky above Chat Moss between Liverpool and Manchester. There are sometimes a couple of hundred of them. The displays can be pretty spectacular, but nowhere near as spectacular as in this remarkable video of starlings above Otmoor in Oxfordshire, filmed by Dylan Winter:

As Richard Dawkins explains in his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, the starlings’ remarkable aerobatic ballet results from each bird within the flock following a relatively simple set of rules. The birds’ wonderfully complex flight patterns emerge from the cumulative, simple actions of the individual birds, in a similar way to water’s wetness and turbulence emerging from the relatively simple interactions of individual water particles.

In my opinion, the fact that such complex behaviour can emerge from simple sets of rules does nothing to detract from the displays; indeed, if anything, I would say that it adds to the Wow! Factor.