A FAMILIAR sight in our skies but maybe not at such close range, our Camera Club picture of the day taken by Cliff Spooner perfectly captures the motion of a pair of starlings.
The highly social birds are perhaps best known for their winter roosting behaviour, flocking together between the months of October and March to form enormous, dancing murmurations which can be comprised of hundreds of thousands of individuals, their numbers swelled by migrant starlings from across Europe.
However, despite the astounding size of the flocks, the starling population has fallen by more then 80 per cent in recent years and the species is now marked as critically at risk on the Birds of Conservation Concern 4 list, according to the RSPB.
You can help conservators to track and monitor starling populations by logging roost sites. Visit http://www.starlingsintheuk.co.uk/ for more information.
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