The local starlings like to settle on the floodlights of the football pitch a few streets down from my house. The lights are visible from my back garden, all aglow in the evenings when there’s a game on, but when the pitch is quiet on a clear day, the birds are most audible; they raise what I want to call a chatter because in its variety and texture it so strongly suggests the babble of casual human conversation.
Sometimes a handful of the starlings will take off and whirl in a flock around the neighbourhood, passing in front of my house and settling for moments in the closer trees, before rising in a cloud and heading back to the floodlights for another session of doing whatever it is they do up there. If the starlings come to believe the floodlights are a device created for something entirely different to human intentions – and there’s more of them than there are us – then do to the lights belong to the football fans, or to the birds?
I was thinking about this while pottering about in the garden this afternoon. I pulled up some dead stuff and planted some bulbs for next year. I largely follow my instincts when gardening because most of the time I don’t know what I’m doing and there’s nobody around to tell me what I’m doing is wrong. I don’t think I am the best gardener but I make an effort.
I read something not long ago about an experiment which involved hooking up the brain of a live bird to a device which traced its electrical impulses when in song, the point being that there was some kind of correlation between the patterns of birdsong and human speech. And I remember thinking how cool and clever that experiment was, but also thinking how remarkably crass: a perfect case of materialistic flag-waving over a point which could be made equally well by any sensible child. I suppose such stories appeal to the news media because they seem to prove ‘true’ what many of us had previously taken as a hunch.
But I can’t find any reports of this experiment now so it’s quite possible that I might have dreamt it up. While trying to find it again I stumbled upon this curious 1961 article from Popular Science which describes starlings in terms wholly alien to me: a pest to crops, a nuisance to city-dwellers, and a hazard to low-flying aircraft. It describes the birds in a language which is weirdly and almost politically anthropomorphic: ‘They behave shrewdly in small groups…They move in vast flocks, apparently recognize group leaders…’ and apparently they even engage in ‘psychological warfare’ with other birds. Not only that but the techniques used to dispatch the creatures en masse are vaguely reminiscent of modern crowd control methods — kettling, bright lights, deprivation of natural habitat – happily, we have not yet moved on to giant nets and poison absorbed through the feet for dispersing flocks of pestilent humans.
