It’s late afternoon in the car park of Workington Asda. A little crowd is gathering in one corner, most of them clutching cameras and tripods. We’re not here to find ‘Workington Man’, the supposed archetypal voter who apparently all the parties need to court to win this election. Instead, Workington men and women — and a number of us from all over Cumbria — are here to watch a bunch of birds going to bed.
The sun is at that dripping egg-yolk stage where it’s about to slip behind the horizon. It’s cold, and for a few minutes you can see the panic on the faces of the birdwatchers. Perhaps the starlings aren’t coming tonight. Perhaps we’ve missed them. Perhaps the other shoppers will think we’re a bit weird.
Of course, the birds turn up at the same time they always do. We can hear them first: a rushing of wings and calls, and then the cloud of tens or even hundreds of thousands whooshes over our heads. The murmuration has begun.
Watching a starling murmuration is my version of going to evening prayer. It gives me the same slightly religious sense of wonder that I once felt in churches. The birds move in a thick shoal as they prepare for their evening roost in the winter months, crowding together to confuse predators who can’t focus on one to catch. When a sparrowhawk does get close, it pushes the birds into even stranger shapes in the sky. Fireworks seem so tame in comparison to the horses’ heads, dinosaurs, whales and mushroom clouds that starlings create in the sky, just for a moment, before flickering into another pattern. When I took some children to watch their first murmuration last winter, we all ooh-d and ahh-d as much as we’d do on bonfire night.
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