“There is no single definitive explanation for why starlings murmurate, though most scientists theorize that the behavior helps protect the birds from predators. (Another possible explanation is that murmurations can help the starlings keep warm in the evening by recruiting larger roosts.)”
– Søren Solkær for The New York Times, April 2022
It was a cold California January, the air bitter as the last remnants of Christmas blew away. I drove through my town and saw a line of people pressed up against the chain link fence of the cemetery, bundled in coats and hats. Some had cameras, others had their children.
I took a left off the main road and pulled into the parking lot of the mall across the street, the concrete full of lamppost sentinels once meant for shoppers at the now-abandoned Sears. Carefully choosing a spot that was far enough from any cars or people, but not so far that my view was obstructed, I shut off my engine, put on my coat and mask, stepped out, and waited for the show to begin.
murmuration, n.
1.a. The action of murmuring; the continuous utterance of low, barely audible sounds; complaining, grumbling; an instance of this.
2.a. A flock (of starlings); spec. (in later use) a large gathering of starlings creating intricate patterns in flight.
– From the Oxford English Dictionary
The starlings first appeared to me in late November. On a hiatus from Instagram for the winter, I consumed my trivial human drama and information from the local communication app, Nextdoor, a platform known for complaints about leaf blowers and anti-coyote fear-mongering. Sometime around Thanksgiving, as I waded through copious posts about dogs needing rehoming and restaurant health and safety “violations,” I began to notice images cropping up about flocks of birds flying at dusk. Thinking it to be nothing at first, I ignored it for more dramatic content and arguments. Eventually, I gave in and clicked on a video. It showed small black birds swooping and diving in a perfectly unified cloud, hypnotic to me and everyone else on the app. As the winter trudged on, struggling beneath the weight of the latest virus variant, it seemed that everyone knew about the birds above the cemetery. So we flocked to our phones, murmured across the internet, watching the birds that could be so close together when we could not.
“Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it”
– Excerpt from “Starlings in Winter” by Mary Oliver
During the first year of the pandemic, the world demanded a payment from each one of us. Some lost their jobs. Some lost their lives. A lighter toll was exacted on me—the world asked only for my warmth.
I have jumped into unheated swimming pools on Christmas Day. I have trekked through Providence in a flooding rainstorm. I have evacuated my dorm wearing sandals and a thin sweater the night after a massive blizzard. Yet it was during my senior year of high school, in a relatively dry California year, when I could not stop shivering. I wore layers of coats and piled my bed in blankets, but without the buffer of my friends and normalcy, the cold found me time and time again. It flooded through the open windows and doors of our classrooms that were meant to promote clean airflow. It filled the six feet of space between customers and me as I rang up book after book. It snuck through the fireplace in my bedroom and bit me as I cried alone at midnight. My warmth, my joy and my sense of connection, was the price I paid for safety, yet it felt more like it had been stolen. So I remained lonely, shivering and shivering through a winter that felt as if it would never end.
starling, n.
1. A common European songbird, Sturnus vulgaris (family Sturnidae), typically having dark iridescent plumage with occasional white speckles, gregarious behaviour, and a loud, mimicking call. Also more fully common starling, European starling. In later use also: any other bird of the family Sturnidae.
2. A structure built around the pier of a bridge so as to protect it from damage by the force of the current, the impact of vessels or floating objects, etc.
– From the Oxford English Dictionary
A peculiar trait of starlings are their migration habits. Unlike the bolder geese or bluebirds, starlings, according to All About Birds, live for the most part across the entire continental United States and stay in their respective locations for the whole year rather than migrating. Thus, while so many other birds flee, starlings stay, braving the winter weather.
I am in awe of the starlings’ ability to continue going, as I barely know how I did the same. Every day I woke up, went to class bleary-eyed, drove to work, came home to homework, then did it all again the next day, shivering and shivering through it all. I suppose I didn’t have another choice. There was nowhere I could escape to, no tropical paradise to avoid the anxiety and loneliness. So I took derivatives and sold store memberships and automatically said “I’m good!,” day after day, month after month.
I envy the starlings because they don’t just stay and survive, they live. Even when the days get cold, even when they are buffeted by wind or pelted by rain, they stick together. They dance and sing and murmurate, living through it all.
“The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”
– Excerpt from “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop
One day during that frigid winter, my mother asked if I wanted to go on a family outing before leaving for work. Usually, my natural FOMO would kick in and I would jump at the opportunity, but something in me led me to say no. I wanted to be alone for an hour, to think in a vast, empty house.
After everyone left, I aimlessly wandered my room, first trying to play the ukulele and then attempting to write poetry, but I quickly gave up, as each failed to transform me the way I desperately wanted. Eventually, I laid down on my carpet in a patch of sunlight, hoping the rays would be enough to unfreeze me, to shine a spotlight on everything that I had misplaced.
Twenty minutes later I pulled myself off the floor and left for work. Still cold. Still lost.
“Release, release;
between cold death and a fever,
send what you will, I will listen.
All things come to an end.
No, they go on forever.”
– Excerpt from “Train Ride” by Ruth Stone
Owing to its proximity to the cemetery, the shopping mall of my childhood became a ghost town. The Sears at the south end was the first to go after years of discussions about its potential closure. Soon after, the other stores shut down one by one, lights going out and metal bars slamming over gaping entryways. Only traces of their former signage and decor remained, staining the walls and floors with reminders of what once was.
It wasn’t always this way. In middle school, we used to walk to the mall after finals, exiting school through the muddy springtime field down to the main road. Once we arrived, we bought mediocre sushi and flavorless boba and spent far too much money in the Bath and Body Works and H&M. Our voices filled the cavernous walls, mixing with the pop music and the racks of clothes and the laughter of children.
But soon our parents picked us up and we scattered to different high schools and all of a sudden the stores we had once loved disappeared. When I visit now, I hear my footsteps echo, bouncing off the deserted Forever 21 across to the empty Pacsun. The small three-seat toddler’s carousel remains in working condition, and sometimes, as I wander through the building, I’ll hear the bright xylophone of “Ring Around the Rosy” coming from the machine. I don’t grieve who I was in middle school, but I mourn the innocence we had, the liveliness, the belief that life is all fluorescent and colorful and shiny.
Because life is not always a late spring day. Sometimes it echoes all around you, empty of laughter and light.
“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all -”
– Excerpt from “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” by Emily Dickinson
In a video posted by a local news channel, a murmuration above the cemetery, spread out in a massive oval, suddenly twists into a dark circle, right before a hawk swoops in. The hawk flies in and out several times, briefly scattering some birds, but the murmuration simply tightens again, and all the starlings are together once more. Eventually, the hawk flies away. The camera is too far to tell whether it has eaten its fill or simply given up, but I like to imagine the latter.
“The movement of starlings shows characteristics of what’s called scale-free behavioral correlation, meaning that a change in the state of a single starling can affect—and be affected by—every other starling in the flock, no matter the flock size.”
– Søren Solkær for The New York Times, April 2022
As the starlings began their early evening dance above the cemetery, murmurs of joy swept across the brisk parking lot. I made eye contact with another person standing outside their car nearby. We both smiled behind our masks.
From my far camera angle, the starlings seemed like nothing more than a smear on the lens. Tiny black pinpoints against a pale blue and pink cumulous sky. Yet standing on the cracked concrete, the starlings are as large, larger even, than the clouds themselves. They twist and float through the air, dive behind trees and re-emerge, playing peekaboo with their fanbase. It is not a large murmuration; perhaps the starlings have tired out from putting on their show every night for over a month. But it is striking, nonetheless. The starlings pull us out of our houses, out of our heads, for a half hour or so. Behind that hollow mall in the waning afternoon light, murmurs mixing with the distant rush of the highway, our shared grief and pain of the past nine months is replaced, even for just a moment, by the wonder of the starlings. It is a promise that we are alive, a vital reminder.
We are not alone, even if we only occupy space in a cloud.
Sole Magazine