When I'm round at my sister's house I generally get to sit right opposite the railway line. There it is ! And often there's a string of Starling sitting there. Quite a feat in itself. But when you watch them, there's a lot going on. Mostly fairly mystifying. For a start, there's a lot of shuffling left and right .... sometimes just a few inches, sometimes quite a long way. This often results in a bird joining an adjacent little group. Why ? And then there's the groups themselves. Why ? How ? When a Starling comes in to join the others, what decides where it goes ? Does it "recognise" other Starlings ? Are they family groups ? Does an individual avoid others, because it knows they are aggressive ? Do Starlings then have " body language.?" When they get put up by a train, do they regroup as they were before? I would love to find out that some researcher somewhere spends their working life filming it all, identifying patterns-of-shuffling, group sizes, group faithfulness and the like. You can barely imagine the excitement of it all ! It would have to involve marking/ringing the birds in some way so as to be able to get very far. And monitoring nests to get to know the members of the various families in the area. And there's loads of graphs to be drawn, and pie charts, and plenty of obscure formulae using µ and ± and ° and « suchlike. On a completely different tack, could they be trying to tell me something ? It's not unlike a sort of Morse Code or Braille. It makes you think. Hey ... those little groups could be gangs .. it could all be "gang culture." And here's a truly edifying video ...
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AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
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