Crows circles high in a slow black ballet of repeated shapes

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/16/claxton-norfolk-crows-circles-high

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The corvid roost at Buckenham Carrs is an extraordinary phenomenon. Every night from October until February the jackdaws and rooks from an area of about 400 sq km of the Norfolk Broads drain steadily out of their many individual sites dotted across the parishes, into a series of ever-increasing pre-roost flocks. Come the hour before dusk, the entire regional population is probably in a dozen fields. By the end of evening all those birds are together in one wood, while the surrounding countryside is devoid of either species.

I find it moving to reflect that, as I watch "my" birds concentrate near our house, exactly the same process is unfolding nationwide. If you look out of your window at dusk today wherever you may be in these islands, from Wick and Stornoway, to Lydd and Landewednack, you will catch some fragment of this same flocking process.

The only difference is that the Buckenham roost likely involves more birds. Exactly how many is a matter of debate but it is probably never less than 40,000 and seldom as high as the largest claims (80,000). What is indisputable is the beauty and power of the spectacle, which is all the more moving for comprising merely a load of old crows. The basic vision that so many birds present to the spectator is a graceful flowing of wings enfolded within the wider ocean of their contact calls. When this torrid movement circles high in the blue it seems a gloriously slow black ballet of repeated shapes. When it dips lower over the wood, as it does tonight, it achieves a nice tension with the up-thrusting architecture of the bare trees.

These create a crazed pattern of fracture lines whose stillness measures and gives context to the modulated current of birds. Steadily as this last flight unfolds, one pattern amalgamates with the other until you are left with a final resolution: a sweep of winter trees foliated with birds and softened by the velvet of their dark voices.