The Meanings of a Word
I met him on Campus Way, a walking path through Oregon State’s campus that ultimately leads to pastures and a covered bridge. I walk there almost every day. He was holding binoculars, looking at a stretch of birds perched on overhead wires. There were a lot of them, forty or so.
I couldn’t resist. See anything good up there? What I meant was, anything other than starlings?
Just starlings, he said.
People with binoculars who are looking at birds like to talk about birds, so I went on.
When I was a kid, I said, thousands of starlings took over the trees on our street. There was poop everywhere. We never thought they’d leave. Being a birdwatcher, I figured he wouldn’t mind me mentioning the poop. Might even get a smile out of him.
Instead, he said, Ah. That would have been a murmuration.
I’m sorry.
A murmuration. It’s the word that describes what you saw.
I asked him if he could spell it.
Just like murmur, he said. Like the sound they made in your trees.
I wouldn’t have described the sound of ten thousand starlings cawing in a canopy a murmur, but I remembered it anyway, looked it up when I got home. According to Google AI, a murmuration is a natural phenomenon where thousands of birds, usually starlings, fly together in a swirling, changing pattern.
What we didn’t see when we were kids was the starlings’ arrival, their flight, the actual murmuration. What we experienced was their landing. Their roosting. Their rest. For weeks, we heard their collective sound, and it was both chilling and thrilling. We’d all seen The Birds after all. Somebody even put fake Owls in the trees to scare them away. It didn’t work. It went on so long that we felt as though their presence (and their poop) would never end.
When birds form a murmuration, like a large flock of starlings, there is no single "leader" directing the group; each bird essentially follows the movements of its immediate neighbors…
Interesting.
When I looked up the etymology of ‘murmuration’, Merriam Webster said it was from the Medieval Latin, murmuratio, meaning murmuring or grumbling. Like the word ‘murmur,’ to hum (like bees), to growl, grumble, or complain.
There were metaphors and similes, lessons even, everywhere I looked.
I did not know that word! Now I know what to call that mesmerizing display.
I've always loved that word, as if you are watching the sound you cannot hear.