In the bird bath

A murmuration fascination

It’s February. It is cold, grey, wet and windy, and I am in the sea.

Each day I think perhaps I don’t need to do this. I already have enough photographs, I know what it looks like from the water. It would be totally OK to watch from the shore. No one asked me to do this. And yet…

There is no particular joy in taking off my perfectly warm clothes on the beach. There is little enjoyment in huffing and stuffing myself into a thick rubber suit like an undignified sausage. I get no pleasure from the first, icy stabs of water down my back as I waddle inelegantly into the waves. But…

I’m too early. No matter how late I get in, I’m always ahead of the game. I’m in the sea, I’m ready to go, I’m gently losing the feeling in my fingers, but the players are still elsewhere. I swim in circles to keep warm while people look down from the pier, wave and take my picture. They wonder what I’m doing. So do I…

And then they arrive.

For the next twenty minutes I am completely transfixed, and everything else is forgotten. Thousands of starlings gather above me, swooping lower and lower over the water, in tighter and tighter formations as they edge closer to their roost under the pier. I swim this way and that, trying and failing to keep up. I point my camera at it all, and hope that a mixture of experience and serendipity collide on the sensor. It feels frantic, breathless and thoroughly immersive.

Towards the end I begin to hear them too. The sound of countless wingbeats thrumming past just overhead is hard to describe. It’s both gentle and noisy all at once, a sudden explosion of softness. The murmur in the murmuration is a sound like no other.

They make sharp turns and sudden changes in density. Groups overlap, split, and join each other once again. It is a beautifully rehearsed display, but it must be entirely improvised each night. There are no collisions, no accidents and I have no understanding quite how it’s done.

It finishes before I’m ready to go. One last lunge under the ironwork and they’re done. A few stragglers continue their dance into the darkness, but the party is over and I’m left with a long swim home by the light of the LED pier.

I get changed on a dark, empty beach. Most of the pictures won’t have worked, most will just be blurs and splashes and grain and noise. But just maybe there will be one that’s worth a look, possibly worth a print, perhaps something to hang on the wall at the gallery, a unique reminder of why I did it.

I’ll be back tomorrow of course…

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Some pictures from the 2025 swims so far (and a little video at the end). A work in progress, still a few weeks to go…

And the long swim home along Brighton’s very own red carpet.

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And finally a short, rather grainy, slow motion video made during one of the murmurations last week (no sound I’m afraid). If you fancy catching the murmuration for yourself, head down to Brighton Pier around sunset and join the audience. There should still be a few weeks left before they disappear again at the end of winter. Wrap up warm, it’s colder than you think!

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There are more murmuration pictures, from land and sea, available at my gallery on Brighton beach, you can see them all at:

www.brightonphotography.com/brighton-starling-murmurations

Thanks for reading!