The unruly chorus of common starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) fills the fields to the east of Otley, sending the sounds of chattering, chirping, tweeting and trilling across a radius of at least half a mile. I immediately feel my spirits perk up at the sound of this jostling collective conversation, a ball of bright white noise in an otherwise muted February landscape.
I get closer and see hundreds of dark silhouettes festooning the bare branches of a tall ash tree. Starlings are sometimes the subject of a certain petty prejudice; perhaps there is something uncomfortably insectoid in the way they teem and swarm, in their collective intelligence. Even their oily, iridescent plumage – which looks black at a distance but up-close shimmers green and purple like a puddle of petrol – has a hint of beetle armour about it.
This group intellect is what enables starlings to produce their famous strobing, morphing murmurations, and while I don’t see this happen today, I do get a hint of the hive mind in action. I walk towards the tree, but clearly get a bit too close, and the entire flock instantly muzzles itself, like the saloon falling silent in a western. A few moments of silence, the swarm sizes me up, and the cacophony gradually starts up again. I’m not very threatening, it seems, but the speed of their massed decision-making seems to border on the telepathic.
Starling numbers plummeted a staggering 87% between 1967 and 2015, and are still in freefall. The rise of industrial agriculture is thought to be one of the possible causes, but the lightly managed fields around here probably still provide the birds with a rich larder of invertebrate food. This is just one example of the biodiversity value of this swathe of open country, and Leeds city council is to be commended for listening to local voices and deciding to rethink its initial plans for a massive, poorly considered housing development in these fields.
This is good news, at least for now. Any new plans must accommodate all the animal occupants of this landscape, not just the human ones.
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