The Magic Of Starlings.

 I remember one winters evening when I was a child, walking through an underpass in Romford town centre. The kind of structure beloved of urban planners in the 50s and 60s, dishevelled by the 1980s and 90s of my childhood and youth. I recall reaching an open space at the bottom end of Romford Market, a sort of roundabout for pedestrians, open to the sky and fringed by small street trees. There was a cacophony in the skies, twittering, and the distinct whirring of hundreds of tiny wings. I was in the shadow of an urban murmuration, a big flock of starlings making their way to a communal roost somewhere else in town. I recall even at that young age, fascinated by anything small and flighted, being wonderstruck by this sensational display. Starlings are still common, but when I was a kid a flock of them could darken a grey Romford sky. Not so now. They have declined and become much scarcer since. While murmurations as big and bigger than that one I witnessed circa 1989 and still in single digits, still exist, they are few and far between, and invariably something of an avian tourist attraction, and very seldom in town centres. The Starling’s decline has been rapid, tragic and transformative.

Starlings in Cromer, spring 2022

Starlings are familiar, if not the most popular of garden visitors, I recall my aunt referring to the small bands of starlings which visited her bird table of a winters morning in the 1990s as a ‘raiding party,’ and even today they make short work of the fat balls and sunflower seeds we leave out for them. A pair attempted to nest in the apple tree in the back garden this summer, a glorious, noisy nest in a natural tree hole. They lack the tidy, hygienic practices of Blue Tits and other small passerines, which carefully move the fecal sacs away from the nest to avoid giving away its location. A static waterfall of white bird poo coated the bark beneath the hole. The adults were noisy too, attacking any magpie which landed in the adjacent trees. Sadly, I fear their efforts were not enough to protect their chicks from the big, mean corvids, as the nest fell silent one day, and no brown coated juveniles were seen on the lawn as I had hoped. I believe the garden nest of which I was most proud was not successful.

Starling in Maldon, Essex December 2022

The cause of Starlings’ decline is not known.   Agricultural intensification has led to shortages of food, especially the ‘leatherjacket’ cranefly larvae they particularly enjoy. They are badly affected by environmental pollutants, including medicines in wastewater, where exposed to them, but precise sources of exposure are unclear. Both the wintering, murmuration-forming populations and the resident population, which is highly mobile but not migratory, are in precipitous decline, with various sources pointing to declines of up to 70% since the 1960s, and 51% between 1995-20006.  They remain abundant in the United States, where they were irresponsibly released in the 19th Century, and have since become an invasive species. 

Starlings at a pre-roost gathering in the rigging of a Thames Barge.

But yet, on a winter’s evening on the Somerset Levels, or at Minsmere or Leighton Moss, murmurations in the tens of thousands are still recorded, big wheeling flocks throwing shapes against the cold sunset sky, descending noisily into the reeds, or onto artificial structures- Brighton Pier used to host a famous murmuration, before taking off again in an audible flurry of wings, until eventually, as darkness falls, they settle down, chattering gently to each other, before falling silent until morning, when they rise again in the dawn light, dispersing in small flocks- raiding parties, perhaps- to feed on whatever they can find, probing for invertebrates with the Lapwings in open fields, visiting and emptying your bird feeders, even raiding bins.  The crowd on the promenade sign pictured, from Cromer on the North Norfolk Coast, were eagerly descending on any dropped human food, and making a fuss around the dumpsters behind a chippy.  Individually starlings are beautiful, star spotted, iridescent, especially in the breeding season, when their bills turn from black to yellow and their plumage, with the protective breast feathers worn away over the hardships of winter, reveal a deep iridescence, of blues, greens and purples. Juveniles are solid brown, moulting into winter plumage in unusual patterns- a spangly starling with a brown head, often confusing inexperienced birders. But it is in numbers that they are most spectacular, and sought after, while barely anyone but little child-me looked up as they descended on Romford Market, the roost on the Somerset levels attracted hundreds of eager tourists, watching the Starlings of Bristol and Western Super Mare descend on the whispering reeds of the levels not far from Glastonbury Tour. Families had brought their kids to see them, and photographers brought an arsenal of lenses to capture the strange forms against the sunset. A group of students from Bristol Uni watched admiringly the psychedelic shapes in the sky, while an elderly gentleman with an elderly pair of swift binoculars watched from his mobility scooter. All left grinning along the banks or the muddy canal, to the car park in the dark.

The Otmoor Murmuration

I most recently watched a Murmuration when my partner, Emma and I headed up to Otmoor, the RSPB reserve near Oxford. Even on a grey Monday evening, the anticipation in the air was tangible as the sun briefly appeared through the clouds as it crossed the horizon, briefly flooding the countryside with orange glow before disappearing. We thought, standing in semi darkness, we might have missed the spectacle. However, we needn’t have worried, as the small, oval flocks began to converge in the sky, just above the treeline, merging into each other to form the big murmuration, which flowed in the air, creating strange forms there, ever growing as stragglers came to join it. After a couple of massed passes the starlings began to funnel down into the reeds, The sound, the whirr of wings, even at a distance, make the murmuration a sensory experience. I’ve never heard the sound of a murmuration accurately reproduced in Springwatch or any similar media documentaries, it seems a thing only to be experienced live. They funnelled into the reeds, the flock separating, as if the back end of it needs to wait in a holding pattern behind the disappearing lead birds, flowing back and forth like a liquid wave, until resuming the descent once the first wave had perched up.

The Otmoor Murmuration

Soon the birds had all disappeared into the reeds, though they kept twittering noisily, and one had to wonder what information was being shared down there. After about 20 minutes, something changed, and to our immense surprise, what seemed to be the entire flock took off, leaving the reedbed at speed for something low down on the other side of the path, leaving the reeds outside the hide once again silent.

And singly, they're pretty beautiful too. Starling in Cromer, Norfolk. 

The beauty of a murmuration is incredible. Inspiring. To all. You should probably go and see one. Before it is too late.

High Fashion and Green Metal in an Essex Summer: The Lestidae Damselflies

 As it is (ed: Not long past) Christmas, and I have already written of a decidedly Christmassy species, I thought, in the dark of St Stephen’s Night, to revisit the insects with which I spent a privileged summer, through the coastal marshes of Essex. The Lestidae damselflies, or Emerald Damselflies, come in a range of shades from key lime pie green, to metallic fir tree tinsel green, some bearing a dusty blue pruinescence. They are desperately fashionable too, subject of many treatises, management plans and UK Wildlife Podcasts, in part because of their undoubted beauty, more subtle than that of the splendid Calopteryx spp - perhaps more of them later- and less easily spotted than the big Aeshnids I wrote about before. Essex is their spiritual home- and arguably one of the epicentres of their remarkable colonisation of these islands. All four breeding species are found in the county, and I had the privilege of meeting them all over the summer of 2022.

Scarce Emerald Damselfly nomming a Blue Tailed Damselfly (Ishnura elegans)

Willow Emerald Damselfy, RSPB Bowers' Marsh, Essex. 

My first encounter with these splendid creatures was a couple of years ago at RSPB Rainham Marshes, where I met a gorgeous, deep bronze green insect hanging serenely on some wetland tree that may or may not have been the one from which it took its common name. This slim and delicate creature was a Willow Emerald (Chalcolestes viridis) a stunning creature which immediately caught my eye, especially as it was October, when all but the hardiest Common Darters and Migrant Hawkers had reached the end of their season. The Willow Emerald is unique among British odonata as it does not lay its eggs in water, but instead, in neat incisions made in woody vegetation overhanging water with a modified ovipositor. I have witnessed them laying eggs like this while still in tandem, the male gripping the female with his anal claspers, protecting, or jealously guarding her. From these eggs the tiny prolarvae emerge in spring, and drop into the water below to continue their life cycle, much more typically. Any which fail to find water do not make it, but conversely, being to an extent free of the need for water during late summer oviposition offers an advantage in a drying climate.  This species was first recorded breeding in the UK in something like 2009, in Suffolk. On a September walk by the Thames at Tilbury in 2022, with my good friend Chris, we found hundreds of these beautiful, bronze green insects, hanging out on Brambles tens of metres from fresh water. It is a species which has undergone a meteoric rise. Look for an all-green Damselfly, sometimes shimmering bronze in the sunshine as the light catches its iridescence, with clear wings (mind those flashy Calopteryx!) white pterostigmas (the dots in the ‘outboard’ corners of the wings), hanging out on marginal woody vegetation near still or slow-moving water.

Willow Emerald, Tilbury, September 2022

A few years later, while walking among the ditches at an EWT nature reserve way off the beaten track yet not too far from Basildon. Hanging on a branch, apparently relatively freshly emerged, was a beautiful male Scarce Emerald (Lestes dryas). Contrary to its English name, this species seemed very numerous on the sites where it lived. A hulking brute of a damselfly, size being a key if not universally reliable way of separating it from the smaller Emerald Damselfly (Lestes sponsa), and another species identified as having a distinct upward population trend, it likes Sea Clubrush choked ditches, sometimes to the consternation of site managers irked by its insistence on enjoying exactly the habitats wading birds do not, and often co-occurs on the coastal grazing marshes also favoured by Small-Red Eyed Damselflies and Ruddy Darter Damselflies. Like all Odonata it is an active predator, adult and nymph, largely taking small flies,  but not averse to dining on its distant relatives. At RSPB Old Hall, what I initially took to be a mating pair of Blue-Tailed Damselflies, turned out on closer inspection to be a Scarce Emerald feasting on the corpse of a Blue-Tailed Damselfly. In addition to an impressive display of predation, though I had no way of telling whether the Emerald had caught its prey on the wing or simply made a fortuitously (for the Emerald) timed landing, it represented a good chance to compare the blue bits of the two species. The steel blue pruinescence, a dusting of scales which fades with age, contrasted strongly with the almost luminescent looking blue tail-light of the commoner species.  Scan through the big crowds of Blue Tailed Damselflies for this big beast, and use your close-focus bins or a good photo to identify it by the pruinescence covering the whole of the first two segments of the abdomen, and the big, bent-paddle claspers at the back end to separate from male Lestes sponsa. A slightly different pattern of green and pale cream on the thorax separates the females of these species.  Look for them in June and July, I saw few of them after the big heatwave of 2022, for reasons unknown, perhaps it baked off the adults or desiccated any late developing nymphs.

Scarce Emerald (female) Essex 2022

Scarce Emerald (Male) Essex 2022

Historically, the commonest of the Lestidae in the British Isles, and still the one you’re most likely to encounter outside of South Eastern England, is Lestes sponsa, the Emerald Damselfly, you may hear it called the Common Emerald Damselfly.   This species has undergone something of a decline of late, like many of our odonata, as documented in the State of Britain’s Dragonflies report. It is hard to separate from L. dryas, I recommend a good book with the illustrations of Richard Lewington in it and a good pair of low-magnifying small binoculars for close focus, though any particularly small Lestes-with-blue-bits is likely to be one. Sadly I encountered just a few of this species during my summer transects.

Emerald Damselfly, Essex, 2022

The fourth species is the newest, and perhaps the slowest colonising, the beautiful and distinctive looking Southern Emerald Damselfly (Lestes barbarus). This is a gorgeous, key lime pie of an insect, with its dark green metallic upper surfaces contrasting with the pale, green-tinged yellow of its undersides, boasting a unique and instantly recognisable (yes, really) bicolour pterostigma, half milk white, half blackish brown. It has distinct ‘antehumeral stripes,’ look for markings like braces on its thorax. Its stronghold is on Canvey Island, of all places, I am advised a particular ditch is a good place to look, but I found it on the site near Basildon, where it was a new record. More delicate looking than the other three, it was first recorded in Britain in 2002, in Norfolk, and it’s been gradually colonising low-lying Essex since being discovered at Wat Tyler Country Park by Neil Phillips in July 2010, with other early records coming from Gunners Park, Shoeburyness in 2012. It is a more committed climate change rebel, and habitat specialist, than even the Willow Emerald, relying on ditches drying up in late summer for oviposition. I could scarce believe my eyes when I found one near Basildon on an EWT reserve. These species are moving so fast and unpredictably with their quiet invasion that they are one group in which the observations of keen eyed amateur naturalists and local surveyors can make real changes to known distribution maps.

Southern Emerald Damselfly, EWT site, Essex. 

So think of them on these winter days, and dream of them shimmering beneath a warm summer sky. Their season will roll around soon enough. Get yourself a good dragonfly book, a good pair of bins, and, come June, go to your favourite wetlands. You may just find yourself a new favourite insect there.

Southern Emerald Damselfly

*This blog has been edited since posting to correct the timeline of Southern Emerald colonisation and credit the finder.