The Brighton Bird Ballet

One recompense of the unbelievably short days here (today the sun rose at 7:56AM and will set at 3:55PM) is the visual spectacle we get to watch over the west pier at dusk.

Every afternoon thousands of starlings flock around the burned out pier in the sea. But they don’t just flock. They swoop and swirl and swarm in amazing patterns and shapes. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Sadly my photos from our window do not do the starlings justice. (You’ll mistake them for dust on your screen here, but click on the photos to see a larger and closer view.) Apparently this phenomenon is called “murmuration.” Starlings are year round residents in the south of the UK, but their numbers grow in winter when birds from Northern England and Scandinavia come to dance with them. They feed up to 20 miles away from their winter roost, but return at dusk to rendez-vous with flocks that grow progressively larger. The birds really do look like a swarm or a cloud. Sometimes from far away they remind me of bees.

According to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, starling numbers are in decline in the UK. And so the decaying west pier functions as a kind of urban nature reserve. I love the idea that this burned out human structure has been claimed by birds who can make efficient use of it, in ways that no human might have foreseen.

And I love the afternoon bird ballet. This is definitely one of the things I will miss about Brighton.