Twenty thousand starlings and one epiphany 

The binoculars were a gift to myself last summer. A slightly desperate attempt, if I’m honest, to reconnect with something I’d lost. After Nan died, I kept thinking about the coastal walks we used to take, and how she’d point out seabirds along the Pembrokeshire clifftops. I wanted to find my way back to that somehow.

“Look, love, a cormorant!” she’d say when I was a kid, grabbing my hand and making me stop to really, properly look. I must have seemed impossibly impatient then, desperate to keep moving. Sometimes grief makes you crave the very things you used to resist the most.

I decided the best way to honour Nan’s memory is re-learning to see the natural world the way she taught me to. So I ordered the binoculars. When my partner got me RSPB membership for Christmas, it felt like permission to take this new hobby seriously.

Which is how I found myself at RSPB Newport Wetlands on a January weekend, freezing my backside off with a crowd of strangers, all of us staring hopefully at an enormous reed bed as dusk crept in around us. We were waiting for a murmuration, the spectacle of thousands of starlings moving as one in the sky before they roost for the night.

Our guide had given us a talk beforehand about Sturnus Vulgaris (Latin for “common starling”, though he was at pains to point out there’s nothing common about them). Starlings are brilliant mimics, he told us. Little feathered ventriloquists who can copy everything from other birds to car alarms. Their iridescent plumage catches the light like spilled petrol on tarmac, greens and purples shifting as they move. 

He told us that starling numbers have dropped by over 50% in the last forty years and that 70% won’t make it through their first year. The ones gathering here have travelled from across Northern Europe, following the food as the continent freezes. They used to see up to 100,000 birds here in south Wales in winter. This year, they estimate they’ve seen a fifth of that amount. Climate change and warmer winters mean fewer starlings need to make the journey anymore.

And then, just as my fingertips started to turn blue and I worried we’d see nothing, they came.

At first, just a few dozen birds appeared, black dots against the dimming sky. Then hundreds. Then thousands. The air filled with the sound of them – a rushing, whooshing noise like wind through trees. Twenty thousand starlings moving as one organism, a shape-shifting cloud corkscrewing, dipping and stretching across the sky in impossible formations. 

It was overwhelming in a way I wasn’t prepared for. Proper bucket list, tears-in-my-eyes stuff.

How do they know what to do? Who’s choreographing? Our lovely volunteer guides Kevin and Rosie explained that scientists have disproven a long-standing theory that one alpha bird calls the shots. Instead, each starling communicates with exactly six birds around it, and those six communicate with six more, like a Mexican wave made of feathers. The power of that communication network is why they never crash, and never lose the plot even when a predator swoops in.

Which is exactly what happened. Halfway through the display, a hungry marsh harrier swooped into the fray. The murmuration responded instantly, tightening, twisting, like water flowing around an obstacle. 

Miraculously, and despite his best efforts, the harrier left empty-handed. The starlings continued their dance until, as one, they descended into the reed beds for the night. The sound as they landed – funnelling, the guide called it – was a deafening whoosh. Like a standing ovation of flapping wings.

The whole thing lasted maybe twenty minutes. When it was over, I had no words. Around me, people packed away long lens cameras and compared notes. But I just stood there, binoculars gripped in my freezing hands, processing what I’d witnessed.

It struck me that these wetlands nearly didn’t make it. Back in 2018, there were plans to carve an M4 bypass through the Gwent Levels. All those reedy beds, the otters, water voles, little egrets, the 150 nationally rare invertebrates would have been gone, all because we needed to shave ten minutes off journey times.

Thankfully, campaigners pushed back hard and the Welsh Government listened, scrapping the plans. 

Standing there in the gathering dark, I thought about Nan again. About the way she made me stop and really see. About how much she’d have loved what I’d just experienced.

And I thought about how grief can make you forget the world is still turning. How beauty still exists, even when we’re not paying attention. And that nature doesn’t care whether we’re ready. It just keeps creating these moments of impossible grace. It’s up to us whether we choose to see them. 

I walked back to the car park with strangers who’d witnessed the same spectacle. We were all still stunned. Someone said, “Well, that was quite something, wasn’t it?”, which felt like the understatement of the century.

The binoculars are permanently out of their case now. Paying attention to the world – really looking at it the way Nan taught me – means keeping them ready. They’re tucked safely in my handbag. Just in case.

Murmurations are a winter thing, when the starlings come here from across Europe. The season runs until late February, maybe early March, so there are just a few weeks left to catch them this year. I’ll be back next November, binoculars ready. Some things are worth waiting for. And some things are worth coming back to.

Want to catch a murmuration before the season ends? Check out the Soup and Starling events at RSPB Newport Wetlands: www.rspb.org.uk/reserves-and-events/reserves-a-z/newport-wetlands.