As dusk settles on a November evening we wait in expectation. We are about to watch one of autumn’s wildlife wonders. Such displays in the natural world offer healing and peace in our troubled human world.
Starling Murmuration
The air begins to quiver and fill with dark scribblings. They’re starlings, thousands of them homing in on their ancestral swamp on their nightly communion. They stream in from every direction, joining then breaking ranks and careering off again. Suddenly they become plasmic, a dark aurora, a single pulsing organism… They swing up to the sky….. they skim the reeds in folds and falls of black. They fill out parabolas and helixes with a symmetry you don’t expect from living things. Then suddenly they fall into the reeds. It’s mysterious and transfixing, still beyond understanding.
From an article by Richard Mabey
Nature Cure
Dull November days, the approach of winter, the somber mood of Remembrance Day and the daily world news headlines have all the ingredients for gloom and depression. But Nature has a God – given gift of calming our souls and lifting our spirits. In his book Nature Cure Richard Mabey describes how nature helped bring him out of a time of deep depression.
Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.” ― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
There’s no need for November gloom. A starling murmuration is waiting somewhere nearby!
As the light fades another of November’s spectacles sees lines of rooks, with some jackdaws, making their way towards the woods at Buckenham Carrs in Norfolk. They’ve come from all over Norfolk and parts of Suffolk as they have been doing since before humans came on the scene. This is one of the largest rook roosts in the country with up to 80,000 birds. The rook is a bird embedded within our rural British landscape. It was mentioned in the Doomsday Book. Richard Jefferies tells us that, in the past, country folk set their time by the sight of these streams of rooks making for their roosting sites at sundown,
Watch this spectacular display before the rooks settle into their roosts like black rain, darkening the branches before quietness eventually settles over the scene again. Nature certainly knows how to end the day well.
How we would love to know what is going on here. Instead, having ‘forgotten the words‘, we let it remain one of the secrets of nature and watch and wonder with the wisdom of this old Chinese poet:
“I built my cottage among the habitations of men, And yet there is no clamor of carriages and horses. You ask: “Sir, how can this be done?” “A heart that is distant creates its own solitude.” I pluck chrysanthemums under the eastern hedge, Then gaze afar towards the southern hills. The mountain air is fresh at the dusk of day; The flying birds in flocks return. In these things there lies a deep meaning; I want to tell it, but have forgotten the words.“
A Listening Heart 