Blogger - Aggie Rothon
We set out in a rush to take the dog for a walk this morning. Time had run away with us and my little boy hadn’t even strapped his school shoes on when we left the house. I gave him a piggy back instead and he chattered away in my ear as we strode out towards the field. It was a relief to realise that, on stepping outside, the urgency of the school run had dissipated and the morning was all to be enjoyed.
A shawl of beaded mist shrouded us as we crossed the cattle grid. The field was speckled with buttercups gleaming from an undulating sea of meadow grass. We reached down to touch the coolness of the dew silvering the grass stems. My son plucked a seed head. Its feathered ends glowed as though it had been dipped in to purple paint. ‘It’s beautiful’, he told me and I felt elated that he was able to see nature for all its worth.
To realise the beauty of the small and usual is just as important as an urge to glory in the glamour of the ‘natural icon’. Sometimes it is the species that we overlook as ordinary that need our help the most. The starling is one of our commonest garden birds but its decline elsewhere now means that is listed as a bird of serious conservation concern. Often ignored, on close inspection starlings are magnificent birds. Their iridescent black heads shine purple-green as they dart in a business-line manner through town centres and parks. A hundred starling breasts are shot through with silver as a flock of the birds clamour and whistle from church steeples. As Mark Cocker says in his book Birds Britannica ‘(the) almost year-round delivery makes the (starling’s) performance one of the most underrated of all our common bird songs.’
Unfortunately however, many people think of starlings as pests, perhaps due to the fact that they are a species that live in flocks. Type ‘starling’ in to Google and plenty of opportunities to buy starling proof bird feeders will pop up. Yet take a trip to the centre of Norwich or to Strumpshaw Fen nature reserve and starlings can’t help but appeal. Their thoughtful chatter from the rooftop of the St Peter Mancroft church in town and the swooping magnificence of a winter flock of starlings over a reedbed is as my little boy would say ‘beautiful’.
To give declining starling’s the best chance of future success give them access to your feeders and put up a starling nest box in the garden. Let’s not wait until these birds have disappeared completely before we appreciate the extraordinary nature of their ordinariness.
As featured in the Eastern Daily Press, Saturday 22 June