Awe

In a world that wants a scientific explanation for everything, it is wonderful that, often, the very best things are beyond explanation.

It is even better when those things come, quite literally, out of a clear, blue sky.

At last light on Saturday just gone, after a long, wet walk on Barningham Moor, we- (my immediate family and a nephew)- were driving into Barnard Castle to pick up some bits for our dinner. When it happened, we were making ‘Barnard Castle’ jokes at Dominic Cummings’ expense, as many must have done in the last four years.

As the front passenger, I saw it first: a slight but distinct darkening of the sky ahead of and above the car, and a sensation that the whole sky was, itself, moving. Reasonably quickly, I realised that it was a murmuration of starlings, and told the others. What I hadn’t realised straight away was that it occupied every aerial space to the north, south, east and west of the car, that the whole sky was black with birds. Great pulses, each of tens of thousands of birds, were swerving and uniting above us, on all sides and out into the middle distance, rising and falling like the slow motion action of a cracking whip. God knows how many there, but well over half a million, I would estimate.

We didn’t park particularly safely; we just parked in a hurry, somewhere on the steep hill into town, by a hedge and just above a wood that may or may not have been their roost, and bundled out of the car into the light evening drizzle. For about ten minutes, we just stood there, each in their wordless amazement, irrespective of whether we had the remotest interest in birds, or even nature. We watched those vast black discs of life, at once dark and then light against the sky, as they acted out their evening routine above us.

Prosaically, starlings do this as a pre-roost behaviour to confuse predators, trying to pick the ideal moment to plunge down (technically, it’s called ‘whiffling’) as fast as possible into the chosen tree, reedbed or the like. Too early, and you could be the first to be picked off; too late, and you might end up with the exposed, dangerous roost. Much research has been conducted into how they manage to fly with such apparent synchronicity, and the answer appears to be that they simply take their cue from the four or five birds immediately around them, and that they are bloody good at flying. Nothing more complicated than that.

I have been lucky enough to see huge gatherings of birds many times- King Penguins in St Andrews Bay, South Georgia, Flamingos on Lake Nakuru, Manx Shearwaters on Skomer Island, Starlings themselves on Avalon Marsh- but I cannot say that I have ever been so captivated, or moved than by those birds at Barnard Castle. Same for the others. It was just one of those moments when nature, by which I think I mean anything not directly connected with Man, puts on an astonishing show, unplanned, for free and precisely where we happened to be.

Much of what has gone wrong with our relationship with nature, and therefore why she has become so depleted around here, is down to our determination to prove that we are somehow ‘apart’ from her, that we can construct our own comprehensible world out of our own comprehensible materials, and provide our own kicks from our own sophistication. In other words, we have lost our sense of awe. The joke is on us, as we are missing the best show on earth.

Twice on my long walk from Lymington to Cape Wrath a couple of years ago, I found that I was crying without even feeling sad. That’s what awe looks like, when your body has no other way to process the excess of wonder other than through tears and emotion. And, practically, what that awe does is make you want to protect and enhance what is left.

That little display on Saturday made everyone’s evening, not just mine. It is a little gift that will go on giving deep down inside, long after we have overtly forgotten it.

The awe remains.