Seeing a starling
Seeing a starling, the glossy, speckled bird on lawns and wires, often means seeing a member of a huge flock. In their swirling winter flights, each bird tracks only six or seven neighbors, which is how such big groups hold together.
What it may mean
On winter evenings, starlings gather by the thousands and pour across the sky in shapes that twist, fold and ripple like smoke. No bird is in charge. Physicists who filmed these flocks in Rome found that each starling reacts to about six or seven of its nearest neighbors, whatever the size of the crowd, and that small rule is enough to make the whole cloud turn as one. A single starling probing your lawn is part of that kind of network. People live inside similar webs. Nobody follows the whole city or the whole company; we watch a handful of people closely and copy them, often without noticing. Next time a starling lands on the wire, try naming your own six or seven, the ones whose moves you follow without thinking.
Depending on how you saw it
A huge swirling flock at dusk
A murmuration can hold tens of thousands of starlings turning together before they drop into a roost for the night. Hawks and falcons find it hard to pick out one bird in the moving mass. Where does being part of a crowd keep you safer, and where does it hide you too well?
Probing the lawn with its bill
Starlings walk briskly across lawns, pushing a closed bill into the turf and then forcing it open to make a hole, a trick their strong jaw muscles allow. They find grubs others miss. Which of your problems needs prying open from the inside rather than pecking at from above?
Speckled in winter, glossy in spring
In fall a starling's new feathers have white tips that make it look spotted; by spring the tips wear away and leave it glossy purple and green. The change comes from wear, not a new coat. What has the wear of the past year revealed in you?
A starling that sounds like a car alarm
Starlings copy sounds around them, from other birds to car alarms and phone tones, and weave them into their own chatter. What they hear becomes part of how they speak. Which phrases from the people around you have crept into your own voice?
Why it happens in nature
European starlings were brought to North America on purpose: about a hundred were released in New York's Central Park in 1890 and 1891, and their descendants spread across the continent. In winter they roost in huge flocks, and studies of these flocks found that each bird responds to about six or seven nearest neighbors, which lets the whole group change direction almost at once.
To reflect on
Who are the six or seven people whose moves you follow most closely?