Capturing the Mesmerizing Starling Murmurations: A Journey with S\u00f8ren Solk\u00e6r

The Enchanting Spectacle of Starling Murmurations

Swooping up from the reeds and wetlands of southern Denmark, a storm of starlings rains across the horizon. The cluster of birds looks like droplets of ink across a parchment canvas, sprayed across a dusky sky where they dive and twirl in unison. The birds fold like waves on a shoreline, contorting into abstract formations that loom across the marshes.

Hundreds, thousands, and even millions of starlings flock together in the murmurations, moving as one organism.

The phenomenon, known as a starling murmuration in English or 'black sun' in Danish, lasts just minutes, or even seconds. But it left a lasting impression on Danish photographer S\u00f8ren Solk\u00e6r, who first witnessed the spectacle when he was 10 years old.

'At the time it was by far the wildest thing I had ever seen,' Solk\u00e6r recalled.

Over the next 40 years, Solk\u00e6r built a career as a portrait photographer, traveling the globe to snap iconic images of the world's biggest rockstars \\u2013 Amy Winehouse, Metallica, Paul McCartney, and Led Zeppelin, to name a few. But during a retrospective of his career in 2017, Solk\u00e6r was inspired to try something new.

'The first thing that came to mind was starling murmurations \u2026 this big piece of calligraphy in the sky,' he told CNN. He began photographing the birds near his childhood home in southern Denmark, before following various flocks across Europe, from Ireland to Italy, on their migration trail.

Solk\u00e6r's latest photobook, 'Starling,' published last month, charts this migration journey, and with it, he hopes to inspire a closer relationship with nature.

'One reason why it keeps captivating me is that every time it happens, it's new, it's unique. The shapes that appear in the sky happen only once in the history of the world,' he said. 'I think that's a very good reason to photograph them and to try to capture and share them with others.'

A Sunset Spectacle

Solk\u00e6r first published images of starlings in his 2020 photobook 'Black Sun,' describing it as 'an investigation of where I come from, and dealing with those childhood memories.' After several seasons of photographing the birds near the Wadden Sea in Denmark and neighboring nations, Solk\u00e6r decided to expand the scope of the project and follow the birds as they migrated across the continent.

European starlings can migrate as far north as the Arctic Circle in summer, and in winter, as far south as North Africa. It's during these migrations that the murmurations are most common, although the exact reason behind them remains a mystery: a widely accepted theory is that starlings gather in these dense aerial formations before sunset to make themselves appear larger to predators. But scientists also suspect it may be to attract other starlings to the roost and generate warmth in the cold winters.

Using Instagram hashtags to locate where the murmurations were happening, Solk\u00e6r chose his destinations based on the size of the flock and the presence of predators, like peregrine falcons, as the starlings make the most 'beautiful, graphic shapes' when they are under attack. But even with the best-laid plans, nature is unpredictable.

'It's so ephemeral: you can get five good pictures in half a minute, but then nothing for the next six weeks,' said Solk\u00e6r. 'It doesn't happen every night. The really amazing formations normally happen once or twice during a winter.'

The Marvels of Microscopic Exploration

While starlings are often thought of as a common bird in Europe and North America, their numbers have been in decline for decades \\u2013 falling 53% between 1995 and 2018 - and in the UK they are on the Red List of threatened species.

'There are a lot less birds now than they used to be,' Solk\u00e6r said, pointing to the increasing use of land for agriculture, which has reduced the available food.

After the success of 'Black Sun,' many biologists and ornithologists reached out to Solk\u00e6rinspiring him to not just look at starlings from a distance, but up close, too.

In collaboration with the University of Copenhagen, he produced two series of images shot through microscopes.

'They have really beautiful metallic feathers when you're up close,' said Solk\u00e6r. 'I've tried to go from the big, macro world that I've seen in the sky, to seeing if I could find some of the same universal patterns if I went really, really close.'

One ornithologist\u2014an octogenarian professor at the Museum of Natural History\u2014provided Solk\u00e6r with a taxidermized starling from the museum's collection for him to photograph.

'I could see from the little tag attached to its leg that it had died in 1918 from flying into a lighthouse, (but it still) looked perfect,' said Solk\u00e6r.

He photographed the bird under light and electron microscopes, magnifying the starling up to 12,000 times. The detailed images show the dense yet delicate feather strands, resembling map contours, palm fronds, and tree trunks, providing a striking contrast to his open-sky shots of the murmurations.

A starling feather, magnified 1,500 times and photographed under a microscope.