20,000 starlings and one epiphany

THE binoculars were a gift to myself last summer.

- SARA ROBINSON

> Starling murmurations offer a spectacular sight

(PICTURE: Philip Taylor)

A slightly desperate attempt, if I’m honest, to reconnect with something I'd lost.After Nan died, I kept thinking about the coastal walks we used to take, and how she'd point out seabirds along the Pembrokeshire clifftops. I wanted to find my way back to that somehow.

"Look, love, a cormorant!" she’d say when I was a kid, grabbing my hand and making me stop to really, properly look. I must have seemed impossibly impatient then, desperate to keep moving. Sometimes grief makes you crave the very things you used to resist the most.

I decided the best way to honour Nan's memory is relearning to see the natural world the way she taught me to. So I ordered the binoculars. When my partner got me an RSPB membership for Christmas, it felt like permission to take this new hobby seriously.

Which is how I found myself at RSPB Newport Wetlands on a January weekend, freezing my backside off with a crowd of strangers, all of us staring hopefully at an enormous reed bed as dusk crept in around us.

We were waiting for a murmuration, the spectacle of thousands of starlings moving as one in the sky before they roost for the night.

Our guide had given us a talk beforehand about Sturnus Vulgaris (Latin for "common starling", though he was at pains to point out there's nothing common about them). Starlings are brilliant mimics, he told us. Little feathered ventriloquists who can copy everything from other birds to car alarms. Their iridescent plumage catches the light like spilled petrol on tarmac, greens and purples shifting as they move.