This is a post that’s been on my to-write list for years. Heading out to Buckenham to see the UK’s largest corvid roost has been something of an annual pilgrimage since I came to Norfolk – but each year I tried to capture it in photographs, I felt like the images I had weren’t *quite* there yet. This year, we’ve had a run of January days with the perfect weather for corvid viewing – cold and crystal clear with the silhouettes of the trees pin sharp against the pastels of the sunset. I set out at golden hour and had reached my viewing point just as the caws of the jackdaws started to become the dominant bird call. I sat down in the mud, coffee in tow, and waited.
I think one of the reasons why I never feel like my photographs do justice to this spectacle is that it’s about so much more that seeing 50,000 to 80,000 birds all in the sky at the same time. It’s about the anticipation, and having to have faith that the empty agricultural landscape before you really is going to get so full of birds that the sky seems to liquify into black streams and eddies. It’s about getting cold hands and a cold bum and having to pace around a bit to keep some feeling in your feet. It’s about the intangible quality of the noise that’s created by thousands of wing beats coming together, and tiny changes of light as the orange glow fades and the moon rises.
The roost at Buckingham builds bit by bit, with the earliest birds weighing down the telegraph poles as they’re joined by others who’ve been hanging out in nearby fields. They build and build, occasionally eddying up if they see a predator or decide to rearrange themselves, until some untold threshold is reached. Then they all take to the sky in a shouting, swirling mass – not balletic and coordinated like a starling murmuration but riotous and loud and hectic, a wonderful mess of birds stretches across the horizon. You get a glorious minute as they pass over your head, before they drop into the woods and become invisible once again; a city in the sky that’s gone in 60 seconds.
It’s impossible to capture in a photograph, but every time the buzz makes me forget how cold I am. It’s such a magnificent spectacle that it’s hard to wrap your head around the fact that it’s repeated every day through the winter – surely something this breathtaking should happen once in a blue moon? But nature is amazing that way. Long may it continue.
Ooh have to time a visit for that experience. And I have just the thing to prevent the cold, I’ll bring it over next time!