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‘You get one split second’: The story behind a viral bird photo
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By his own admission, James Crombie knew “very, very little” about starlings before Covid-19 struck. An award-winning sports photographer by trade, his only previous encounter with the short-tailed birds occurred when one fell into his fireplace after attempting to nest in the chimney of his home in the Irish Midlands.

“I always had too much going on with sport to think about wildlife,” said Crombie, who has covered three Olympic Games and usually shoots rugby and the Irish game of hurling, in a Zoom interview.

With the pandemic bringing major events to a halt, however, the photographer found himself at a loose end. So, when a recently bereaved friend proposed visiting a nearby lake to see flocks of starlings in flight (known as murmurations), Crombie brought along his camera — one that was conveniently well-suited to the job.

“You get one split second,” he said of the similarities between sport and nature photography. “They’re both shot at relatively high speeds and they’re both shot with equipment that can handle that.”

On that first evening, in late 2020, they saw around 100 starlings take to the sky before roosting at dusk. The pair returned to the lake — Lough Ennell in Ireland’s County Westmeath — over successive nights, choosing different vantage points from which to view the birds. The routine became a form of therapy for his grieving friend and a source of fascination for Crombie.

“It started to become a bit of an obsession,” recalled the photographer, who recently published a book of his starling images. “And every night that we went down, we learned a little bit more. We realized where we had to be and where (the starlings) were going to be. It just started to snowball from there.”
‘I’ve got something special here’
Scientists do not know exactly why starlings form murmurations, though they are thought to offer collective protection against predators, such as falcons. The phenomenon can last from just a few seconds to 45 minutes, sometimes involving tens of thousands of individual birds. In Ireland, starlings’ numbers are boosted during winter, as migrating flocks arrive from breeding grounds around Western Europe and Scandinavia.

Crombie often saw the birds form patterns and abstract shapes, their varying densities appearing like the subtle gradations of paint strokes. The photographer became convinced that, with enough patience, he could capture a recognizable shape.