RSPB Ham Wall Starlings

Been quite busy since the turn of the year, we started our birding year on New Years day with a local patch walk around Haden Hill Park and Corngreaves NR. It was a quietish day with very little activity at first, other than a Jay posing well at the lower pool.

We then had a flurry of activity with Long-tailed, Blue and Great Tits, with the start a single Goldcrest among them. Nice start to 2019! This was followed by Nuthatches calling to one another, in the end we counted I think 5 all within 100 feet of each other.
That was about it though apart from the usual parkland birds, although a Buzzard did put in an appearance late on.

Anyway on to the title of this post, last Thursday Tina suggested we head down to Ham Wall to see the Starling Murmuration as we had seen good reports on social media. It is a two and a half hour drive almost, but hey ho!

The weather was surprisingly sunny, which made for some nice photos (I think!)

 Little Egret,

 Great White Egret,

 Snipe,

 Teal,

 Tufted Duck,

 Aggressive Coot,

 Shoveler,

 Long-tailed Tit,

 Marsh Harrier,

 Gadwall,

 performing Shoveler,

 another smart Gadwall,

 Great Crested Grebe,

 Teal and Snipe.

 The sunset was magnificent.

So onto the Starlings, well they started showing up about 16:15 in at first very separate flocks,

but as the different groups started arriving, they decided that they were too tired to join up and murmurate (is that a word?) a great deal, after a a few quick murmurs, they decided to drop into the reed beds right in front of us:

 A Starling Bush!

They just kept coming for at least 30 minutes, the RSPB estimate was half a million birds!

It was truly amazing, then just as the numbers arriving started to calm down, they proceeded to leave the bed in front of us and relocate over the Tor View Hide, (the noise of the mass lift off us was fantastic), and settle in the reeds on the other side. Again it took at least half an hour for them all to move, by which time it was well and truly dark, so it was time to go home.

A couple of video clips:
The Starlings going down;

Relocating at low level!