The
collective nouns that are used for animals reveals a poetic sensibility that
can be evocative but can also be downright impolite. If you were a rhinoceros
and hanging out with other rhinos would you want to be referred to as ‘a crash of
rhinoceroses’? Or if you were a hippopotamus and were gathering with other
hippos would ‘a bloat of hippopotamuses’ float your boat? And I think calling a
collection of tigers ‘an ambush of tigers’ is just pre-judging them, just
expecting them to misbehave. Birds on the whole come out of this a lot better.
‘A parliament of owls’ is suggestive of thoughtfulness and deliberation even if
today’s politicians tend to spoil these associations. You couldn’t imagine
anything nicer than ‘a charm of goldfinches’ could you? But even with birds the
naming of collectives takes on a gothic tilt: ‘a gulp of magpies’; ‘a murder of
crows’; ‘an unkindness of ravens’.
A
murmuration of starlings has to be the best way of naming a collection of
starlings, and therefore the best collective noun because starlings are really head
and shoulders above the rest of us when it comes to being and acting
collectively. For anyone who has witnessed a murmuration of starlings coming in
to land in some wetlands, or finding a perch on the burnt out remains of a
pleasure pier, it is a stunning sight of pulsing, swooping, flitting movement
choreographed by thousands and thousands of birds in synchronised formations.
The patterns that these starlings make are formless forms: it looks as if they
are constantly on the verge of revealing something – a word, or the face of god.
Murmuration is as near as you can get to describing the sorts of clustering
that starlings make: it doesn’t suggest the visual aspect of their swarming but
nails the white-noise impact of their movement, and the crescendos and diminuendos
of their gathering. I think we should reserve the word murmuration for
starlings, but if we did use it in another context it might be fitting, albeit
differently, for actors. Thus ‘a murmuration of extras’ would designate a large
group of actors in a restaurant scene, for instance, whose main role is to
provide visual noise and the sort of rise and fall of a humming murmur as
background to the protagonists’ dialogue.
According
to Chris Pagham – friend to the ordinary animal, scourge to those who
sentimentalise cuteness – Britain is steadily losing its starling populations.
It turns out that this has nothing much to do with global warming but is linked
to global politics; to be precise, to a form of dictatorial state control in
the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 40s. It seems that Comrade Stalin was super
keen on starlings as a form of natural pest control. He authorised a Union wide
programme of environmental encouragement to starlings. When winter froze the
ground the starlings migrated, and some of them came to Britain. In the 1940s
the winter population of starlings in East Anglia alone was roughly forty
million. Now that must have been some spectacle.
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