It’s getting to that time of year when the light can surprise you. Skies clearing after a morning of rain; mist disappearing in an instant; clouds pinking up overhead, caught through the reflection on a car door. I wrote this at the very start of the year, and I think the whole thing made me something of a murmuration addict. I want to get to the sea, to stand on a pier, to see the sunset and the birds rise and feel the swell of it all around me.

I was on a call when I saw the black cloud hover above the pier. I’d set my laptop up on the round table in the bay window; the interview had been delayed. As the sky blushed, I watched the transcription software throw up the words coming through my phone. High, high above, a cloud glowed. 

I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen birds flock like this before. I’ve some distant memory of it, perhaps it was imagined. I’ve certainly seen more photographs, more videos, uploaded in 15-second, social media snatches. I hadn’t realised that the starlings would cleave together for so long, lift and bellow for so long against the wind. Below, the rush-hour traffic flowed on, cyclists peddled by in fluorescent jackets. How, I wondered, how can you look head on and not stop to watch. 

The pink turned ashy, the string of festoon lights along the seafront clicked on, like Christmas lights out of their box after a year. Still the starlings swam against the air. Still, the man talked. I silently put on my coat, my boots. Sat wrapped in a scarf in a seaview hotel room, waiting for my exit. When it came, I dashed down the stairs and out towards the pier. 

A few hours earlier I’d stopped to take a photo of one of Eastbourne’s salt-wearied buildings, a decades-old sign that read HOTEL in red letters. A couple came out of their house behind me. “Taking photos”, the man said, and I turned, smiled. “Tourist.” He surmised. He was not wrong. I did not live here. I had come for some briny air and a change of scene. I wanted to sleep alone and wake up next to the sea. 

What I had not expected were the starlings, but in hindsight it makes sense. It was late January, when the resident birds are joined by their European cousins; the pier is the right kind of place for them to roost in, it was dusk on a mostly clear evening. But I am not a selkie; I’m a woman born and raised inland. I could not possibly know what it is to take the persistence of waves for granted. 

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Out and the starlings still dipped and dived. I climbed the steps to the pier and darted past a sign crying, a little desperately, “WELL WORTH A VISIT!” The birds were close now, their admirers resting against the railings of the pier like fans at a concert. The murmuration seemed to rise and fall with the waves, which drowned out any sound of the birds’ flapping wings. My heart, my breath, neither were as calmly paced. 

As I edged down the pier I caught the full grasp of the sky: that original pink had shrunk to a severe line, edged in grey and blue. Towards land, towards the rise of the cliffs blackened by sunset, the sky grew an ominous yellow; a bruise. The birds grew closer and bolder, flashed their tiny bodies and pointed wings upon us. I took photos but none could capture the physicality of it. To witness this was to feel something so deeply, a something tethered to mystery. A marvel. 

The birds became a ball. The birds disappeared, then grew into a strange mass. The birds clumped and spread out, like the line on a heart monitor. 

Thousands of years this has been happening and we still don’t know why. Ornithologists think murmurations offer warmth and protection from predators. They think it allows them to share information about where to feed. To me they are an offering in the time of short days and early dusks. When I watched them, all I could think of was dancing.