The Transfixing Beauty of Starling Murmurations

It was a late February night in 2020, and I used to be standing within the marshlands of Friesland, a northern province within the Netherlands. Above my head, a whole lot of hundreds of starlings have been swirling, swooping and diving in a dramatic vogue, blackening the sky.

The sound of their wings reverberated by the air, creating wind patterns on the floor of the nonetheless water.

The transfixing scene was the climax of three years I’d spent following European starlings alongside their migration routes throughout the continent.

My solely companion that night time was a stranger who’d additionally stopped to look at the birds — an elder lady who bore witness to the unimaginable spectacle for near half an hour.

After the birds had settled into the massive reed beds, she turned to me with tears in her eyes. “That was essentially the most stunning factor I’ve ever seen in my whole life,” she mentioned.

I needed to agree along with her.

After a 25-year worldwide profession spent photographing lots of the world’s most well-known musicians and actors, I just lately returned to the panorama of my childhood in southern Denmark to {photograph} a visible phenomenon I first witnessed as a boy.

I started by photographing the massive starling murmurations that happen within the northern stretches of the Wadden Sea, a coastal wetland atmosphere — the world’s largest unbroken system of intertidal sand and dirt flats, in line with its UNESCO World Heritage itemizing — that stretches from the northern coasts of the Netherlands and Germany to the marshlands of southern Denmark.

Right here, every spring and autumn, the skies come to life with the swirling shows of a whole lot of hundreds of starlings — an occasion identified domestically as “kind bol,” or “black solar” — because the birds go by on their seasonal migrations.

Later, I prolonged the attain of my photographic investigation to incorporate Rome, England, the Netherlands, Eire and Catalonia, a area in northeastern Spain.

There isn’t any single definitive clarification for why starlings murmurate, although most scientists theorize that the habits helps defend the birds from predators. (One other potential clarification is that murmurations might help the starlings preserve heat within the night by recruiting bigger roosts.) Shifting in tandem as a single giant entity each confuses predators and lowers the danger for every particular person chicken, a phenomenon referred to as the “dilution impact.”

A lot of the dramatic performances I witnessed occurred when a number of falcons or hawks have been attacking the starling flocks.

What’s tougher to clarify, although, is how the birds are in a position to transfer in such proximity, with their actions so tightly coordinated. Research have discovered that every starling responds to 6 or seven of its nearest neighbors, a quantity that appears to optimize the steadiness between the cohesion of the group and the hassle of the person.

As is true with the motion of faculties of fish and swarms of midges, the motion of starlings reveals traits of what’s referred to as scale-free behavioral correlation, that means {that a} change within the state of a single starling can have an effect on — and be affected by — each different starling within the flock, irrespective of the flock dimension.

In creating this collection of pictures, I used to be impressed by various different artwork types, together with classical panorama portray, calligraphy and Japanese woodblock prints. I used to be additionally impressed by the birds themselves.

When starlings transfer as a single unified organism and assert themselves in opposition to the sky, they create a powerful visible expression, like that of a calligraphic brush stroke. Traces and shapes emerge throughout the swarm, bringing to life bodily abstractions and calling to thoughts the patterns shaped by interfering waves.

The graphic and natural shapes of the starling murmurations vary from meditative to extremely dramatic as they carry out a wide ranging ballet, one with life-and-death penalties.

At occasions the flock appears to own the cohesive energy of superfluids, altering form in an countless flux.

From geometric to natural, from stable to fluid, from materials to ethereal, from actuality to a dream: That is the second I try and seize — a mere fragment of eternity.

Søren Solkær is a Danish photographer. His most up-to-date guide, “Black Solar,” options greater than 100 pictures of starling murmurations. You’ll be able to observe his work on Fb and Instagram.