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Have you ever walked passed an old corrugated metal fence and felt a fluttering running through the worn paintwork? I hadn't until a week or so ago. If I strained very hard I could perhaps convince myself that I could hear it but it was mainly a visual phenomenon. And given the cause of the movement it was surprisingly hard to spot.
It started as a feeling born from the shapes and interactions of the flaked-off, crumbling patches of weathered paintwork. I could see vague wings curling over what felt like a landscape of mudflats, distant sea and clear sky. If you look at the image below of my initial view perhaps you can also see these origins. But then with concentration these impressions crystalised into an endless flock of wading birds, dunlin I think. They flew as a river from left to right, chaotic and impossible to track individually but with a thriving, pulsing flow that never stopped.
It reminded me of reading descriptions of endless flocks of migratory passenger pigeons in North America that would take hours to fly passed. They were blasted from the skies as food for people, as food for pigs and for the sheer fun of it. An endless resource. With a certain poignancy the last ever passenger pigeon was given a name. Martha died in 1914. One of the first well documented examples of anthropogenic extinction. At least this is not going to happen to my flock of waders.
I watched them, unsure of where they were coming from or going to. My presence did not change their course, although any sudden movement from me would send a brief ripple of reaction through the flock before it re-settled into its determined course. It was tempting to provoke them again and again but that's not the kind of relationship I want with nature.
Eventually my eyes began to glaze over until the birds blurred into a unified flow and I decided to leave them to it. The image of them above doesn't quite do justice to the incessant chaotic confusion of such a flock that left me with a better understanding of how difficult it must be for a falcon or hawk to target a single bird.
My initial view before the birds materialised:
This flock of birds flew through the 4th fence panel from the right, they might still be flowing:
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