Sunday 24 February 2013

The Grandest Murmuration

Cycling home from work tonight, struggling on a flattening tyre yet again, I could see them in the far distance even as I entered the badlands of the wasteland cycle path.

Electrons in a cloud chamber...starlings over the KFC.

At times of the year when I'm cycling home in the evening twilight, I'm used to seeing small murmurations along Winthorpe Road and over Macdonalds, and over by the turn onto Northern Road, but this was crazy. It wasn't gaggles of thirty to fifty birds, it was three to five thousand birds in an ever shifting swirl of chaos; a cartoon swarm of hornets making question marks and arrows in the sky; the universe a nanosecond after its creation.

A swarm of birds larger than a football pitch.

Never seen anything like that in any urbanised area before, let alone Newark. It's a sight I shan't forget in a hurry.

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