It is midwinter at Alexanderplatz station in Berlin. A single starling hops along the platform, between the McDonald’s wrappers and empty beer bottles. Suddenly, it lifts off—black wings glinting blue and green—to join hundreds of its kind dancing against the pink evening sky. A murmuration of starlings is one of the great joys of winter. This spectacle of collective movement can feature anything from a few hundred to hundreds of thousands of birds, all whirling with liquid synchronicity. As bird-watcher and author Tim Dee writes in The Running Sky, it resembles “iron filings made to bend to a magnet, ” each bird closely monitoring the flight of its neighbors and reacting in milliseconds to tiny changes in direction. For the starlings, these This story is from Kinfolk Issue Fifty Buy Now Related Stories Arts & Culture Garden Issue 37 Ron Finley An exclusive excerpt from our book, The Kinfolk Garden. Arts & Culture Issue 37 Rendered Impossible Those who can only dream of the great outdoors may as well have some fun while doing it. Arts & Culture Issue 37 Wild Thoughts On the nature of nature writing. Arts & Culture Issue 37 Jane Goodall From her perch in the tiny Tanzanian nature reserve of Gombe, primatologist Jane Goodall changed how we understand the nature of chimpanzees—and ourse Arts & Culture Issue 37 Home Grown In conversation with a plant stylist. Arts & Culture Issue 37 The Force of Nature What do we risk losing when “natural” becomes a synonym for “good”? Ana Kinsella investigates.
Arts & Culture Issue 37 Rendered Impossible Those who can only dream of the great outdoors may as well have some fun while doing it.
Arts & Culture Issue 37 Jane Goodall From her perch in the tiny Tanzanian nature reserve of Gombe, primatologist Jane Goodall changed how we understand the nature of chimpanzees—and ourse
Arts & Culture Issue 37 The Force of Nature What do we risk losing when “natural” becomes a synonym for “good”? Ana Kinsella investigates.
