Roger Ratcliffe: Country & Coast

An hour before sunset at Timble on the ridge between Wharfedale and the Washburn Valley, some starlings in the uppermost branches of a sycamore began to sound the equal of impressionists like Rory Bremner and Alistair McGowan.

There was no attempt at mimicking Prince Charles or David Beckham, of course, but at least one of their number managed to perform a note-perfect rendition of the curlew’s bubbling liquid cry. A couple of minutes later, as clear as a bell came the wheezy buzz of a greenfinch followed by a great tit’s squeaking wire fence of a call.

If daylight hadn’t been fading I would have hung around to hear what this troupe did for an encore, because starlings are remarkable impersonators. When I lived in Headingley I was completely fooled by one pretending to be a car alarm, and walking along The Grove in Ilkley years back I heard the old Nokia mobile ringtone begin to trill from the top of a tree.

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One of the first ornithologists to write about their mimicry was a man whose name keeps cropping up in this centenary year of World War One. Sir Edward Grey, the longest-serving Foreign Secretary in British history, worked as hard as anyone to avoid the horrors of conflict with Germany, and when diplomacy failed in August 1914 he famously uttered those famous words: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

But Grey was also author of the best book written about bird song. In his The Charm of Birds he listed the starling’s “plagiarisms” as including poultry, sparrows and Lapwings. “It is like a gramophone among bird songs,” he wrote, “and it has chosen some of the best of which to make records.”

There are few places starlings don’t venture. Some are preparing to nest in my neighbour’s walnut tree, and it’s hard to imagine a city square without seeing their plumage as they probe for leatherjackets on a fine day. I’ve even encountered them near the summit of Whernside, Yorkshire’s highest point. But familiarity is responsible for the starling becoming our most under-appreciated bird.

Anyone who’s seen colossal dark clouds of starlings swirling in the sky will realise this bird is special. In Yorkshire, these so-called murmurations have sometimes amounted to many thousands of birds, the biggest being a breathtaking 250,000 in number.

There are sizeable roosts at Lady’s Bridge and St Marys Church in Sheffield. I wonder how many people walking past these places are fooled into digging out their mobile phones.