Roost

Autumn dusk on an Essex hillside and the air is full of chatter, squawk and even the punctuation of gutteral grunt. It is roost time. The latter two of those audial adjectives relate to the 180 or so little egret that have flown up from the Thameside marshes below, pristine-white plumage very nearly gleaming in the dimming light, to gather for the night among the thorny scrub. But it is not they that provide the prompt for this post. It is the jackdaw that come together in greater numbers to occupy the same small expanse of scrubby woodland to spend the hours of darkness. And the word ‘chatter’ barely does justice to the vast repertoire of chuckles, croaks, buzzes and churrs possessed by this most loquacious and sociable of birds.

Jackdaws gathering to an Essex roost; a picture that in all honesty does scant justice to the moment.

Together both species provide me with a spectacle of contrast, of improbable whiteness and thickening black, but it is the sweep and swirl of the 500 or so diminutive crows that mesmerises, rooting me to the spot and unable to leave. This may not be spectacle that a winter visitor to Buckenham Marshes in Norfolk would be astounded by – the numbers that congregate there are mind-boggling – yet this murmuration of hundreds, instead of thousand is scarcely any less hypnotic, as the flock expands and folds in on itself, scatters and coalesces, soars upwards and descends with an ebb and flow of thrumming of wings. It is taking place here, where I live, in a place that I know better than any other; that’s what makes this unexpected (in terms of the numbers that I have never seen before of both egret and daw) as special as anywhere else.

We are not far from town. A galaxy of street-lights shimmers across the creeks to the south, while, if I listen for it, the dull drone of rush hour traffic brings a sense of the urban landscape to north that I cannot see. I am reminded that the wonder of the natural world may reside more closely than we think.

Jackdaw (Corvus monedula)

Little Egret (Egretta garzetta)