Today’s guest picture comes from a member of the Archive Group. Joyce enjoys visiting Bermuda where her husband was born, and who can blame her when the views are like this? That is a spider lily in the foreground.
After an active day yesterday, I was happy to while away another grey morning with breakfast, coffee and the crossword merging almost indistinguishably into each other.
There weren’t many birds to distract me. In fact these two siskins were the only ones that I saw on the feeder all morning.
We had to rouse ourselves at noon though, as it was the day of the annual lunch of the Archive Group. I had very carelessly missed this event last year as the sun shone and I got so excited that I went for a cycle ride instead of going to the lunch and completely forgot about it.
I was reminded about that quite a few times today.
We had set several alarms to remind me about the lunch today and walked across to the Eskdale Hotel with Sandy who was passing our gate as we left.
There was a good turn out of members and partners and we enjoyed some good food and conversation, although we were distracted for a moment when someone saw a lion roaming about the street outside the hotel.
It turned out to be taking part in a video shoot to publicise the rugby club so we weren’t too alarmed.
After lunch, we returned home for a snooze in front of the horse racing on the telly but then, alerted by another alarm, we drove up to collect Sandy and went down the road to Longtown with him.
When we had passed through the town yesterday on our way to not watch a film, we had noticed what seemed like a possible murmuration of starlings so we thought that we ought to investigate this further.
As soon as we parked, we could see a lot of starlings overhead…
…and small murmurations soon formed.
They reamined disappointingly small though and a lot of the birds flew down to a pylon…
…and sat on it.
After a while, there were signs of action on all sides.
In our experience of the murmurations at Gretna in past years, the starlings gradually gather into one huge flock but at Longtown today, they stayed stubbornly in many smaller groups.
There were one or two larger groups though and one of them gathered over the High Street.
There weren’t enough in the group to produce the striking patterns that photographers hope for but some good shapes did form and dissolve.
Things did not develop as we hoped and we could still see many separate groups of birds in almost every direction when we looked around.
It was a very cloudy day and it soon got quite dark as the street lamps came on.
All the same, it was great fun watching the starlings above the roofs getting ready to go to their roost and I took a lot of pictures in the gathering gloom.
A few more birds did join the crowd…
…and it became quite an impressive collection…
…swooping and swerving above the houses.
Strange shapes appeared…
…maybe resembling a giant fish…
…or a dove of peace…
…or perhaps just looking like an impressive amount of starlings in one place at one time.
The show lasted 25 minutes and we intend to come back again if we can get a fine evening. We will try to find a better viewpoint if we do return.
For some reason there is no flying bird of the day today.
Yes, that’s a real shame there’s no flying bird of the day.
My apologies.
Some great murmuration shots.
How do they do it without suffering casualties?
There were 200 hundred starlings found dead on a road in Wales recently which they think might have been caused by a flock diving too hard to avoid a predator and hitting the ground. It is amazing to see them as they are quite close together when they do the tight turns.
That was impressive. Someone locally took a photo of some beach birds murmurating in the shape of a bird. I remember when you missed last year’s lunch !
So did everyone else!
It’s good to see the starlings still showing up in numbers. I’ve been wondering about their seeming decline.
You got some amazing shots of them!
We saw a murmuration in Derbyshire on TV tonight and the presenter remarked that this was a recovery after a couple of poor years. The numbers are still definitely down on past years though.
Wow. What a treat! Thanks for all the pics.
A pleasure.
Bravo! Tom. Fantastic shots! 🙂
Thank you HJ. It is a memorable sight.
Lovely photos! Fantastic!
We look forward to the chance to see the starlings in action.
What a marvellous murmuration of spotty starlings seemingly seeking a striking route to the best roosts of the evening – and all for free!
Thank you for your alliterative appreciation. 🙂
Those are beautiful murmuration photos. I would say you had many FBOTDs today.
Our first daffodil blooms opened today, and I see our snowdrops coming up now.
You have beaten us to the first daffodil. We have one nearly ready to go but not quite.
The south side of the old garage gets maximum winter sun.
A spectacular murmuration in the gathering gloom.
Wonderful photographs of so many different shapes, well caught indeed.
Wonderful photos of the starlings…sad about the lack of a FBOTD
I just couldn’t find one anywhere.
Quite amazing murmuration shots – enough flying birds to last us both out.
More impressive than a single chaffinch or siskin, I agree.
Wow! The murmuration shots are fantastic, Tom!
It was a treat to be there to watch the birds.
I, for one, and happy to see that you are still pedaling about a pretty corner of Scotland, even if that should mean an unfortunate missing of a lunch appointment. Chapeau!
I was embarrassed to have missed the lunch last year but the ride was one of the best of the year so I wasn’t quite as sorry as I should have been..
Wonderful catches.
We were very happy to see them as starlings have been in short supply for a year or two.
Wonderful photos of all those starlings… better than the ones on Countryfile just now! Love the guest photo too.
That is kind of you to say but Mrs T and I were just watching the programme and we think that they had a bigger flock than us.
All right. Maybe you have seen better, but I am impressed by those starlings. So much so that I am giving it a Maine “Wowsah!”
The “Wowsah” is received with respect. Thank you.
wonder if you saw the piece on starling murmurations on BBC Countryfile . They said that starling numbers are decreasing. Love your photos.
Huh! Looks to me like you had more than your share of flying birds this day. Murmurations are such fun to watch. Birds are quite the aerial acrobats.
They are indeed