Lifting from the grass, starlings sometimes school and shoal in the air as if fish in the ocean. Hundreds of them might spill from a tree at once, ball together in midair, and then shift about wildly against the blue sky, turning darkside-out or lightside-out with every unified change of direction. This behavior is useful in the presence of hawks or other predators. A single bird is a target.
In the autumn, this behavior intensifies as the birds flock together for migration. You might see thousands of starlings swirling up into dark clouds that swing around trees and over farmhouses and sifting right through the low clouds, flashing new colors, as if electrified, each time they change course. And always you notice a single bird outside the shoaling mass. The single bird remains far out-of-sync, dropping out the bottom when the flock arcs nearly straight-up, tumbling early into a hard turn while the others streak on. On occasion, you allow yourself to follow the solitary starling, the endangered one. Sometimes, you are that single bird.
--Mitchell Hegman
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