Email From America ... Two: Startled by Starlings.

Sunset in Downtown Detroit. Traffic lights blur into soft dots of red. Wind wraps its self around the spire of the Methodist church, all but whistles down Michigan Avenue. The stocky office blocks and chunky, muscular buildings of the USA's North East were built to last in a climate of bitter winds and cruel cold. Almost as soon as I arrived in Detroit, even though the sun was shining, I felt the pelt of hailstones. And yet, refreshing after the sweltering heatwave of California, I like this weather. It is bracing. It gets me moving. It reminds me of home.

Hands stuffed into pockets, I push down Shelby Street, shuffle down the sidewalks with no particular destination. The wind picks up. On Washington Boulevard, the street lights melt into a twilight turning purple. The Ford Building rises like a column of snow. I cross a tasteful square, pass a bunch of old men sitting on a bench playing jolly music. A huge block of apartments stands above us, and from half way up a young man gazes from a window, a tiny blonde speck against the evening sky. I turn another corner, pound another street. A sticker behind a car windscreen declares “I’m so Kamala.”

A shapeshifting bubble of black dots hooks my vision from above. I stand to watch as it swerves and curves like the contracting motions of some jellyfish or zooplankton. It is a starling murmuration – the first I’ve seen in the United States. I could almost be transported home to Yorkshire, watching the birds whisking over the moors and chimneys of the Calder Valley. For a moment, they vanish behind the block, then re-appear, elongated, almost single file, a snaky wave painting dark spirals through the dusk.

Brought here in the Nineteenth Century, when a hundred of the birds was let loose in New York’s Central Park, European starlings are now common in the USA, with a population of around 150 million, a little under a third of their global population. But nowhere have I seen them as profusely as Detroit.  Pluckily, these little winged wonders of Motor City crop up on street corners, in parks, on walls, jutting and pecking and snaffling along like chirpy jack-the-lads, streetwise and chipper. Yet in the air, en-masse, they assume an elegant, rhythmic grace, a musicality. 

Slowly, this twisting troupe balloons, until its form resembles that of a cloud.  It curls through the gap between two buildings, dips and dives over traffic lights, whips around the bend and back again, now joined by a second batch. Amazingly, the two companies do not collide; not a wing out of place, each bird seems both a virtuoso individual, a miniature Nijinsky neatly balanced and nimble, and a tiny component of a living, breathing whole. Before long, I am watching three murmurations, weaving in and out of one another’s orbit, floating islands of birds swarming like puffs of black sherbet, a speckled spectacle of startling starlings, and am all but oblivious to the goings on around me in this bustling city centre.

The night grows colder. Around the edges of my camera, my fingers feel the nip of it. As I look up once more, the brilliant black ballet is edging away, into the distance and behind a mountain range of skyscrapers. The sky has turned a deep magenta, the colour of Turkish Delight.  The traffic surges on, head lamps like fluorescent blobs of multi-coloured snow. I pull the back of my beanie hat down my neck, and head for my hotel.