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Rushing up from the reeds and marshes of southern Denmark, a storm of starlings is raining across the sky. The cluster of birds looks like drops of ink across a parchment canvas, sprayed across a black sky where they dip and turn together. The birds return like waves to the shore, drifting into abstract formations that move across the marshes.
The phenomenon, known as starling murmuration in English or “black sun” in Danish, only lasts a minute, or even a second. But it left a lasting impression on Danish photographer Søren Solkær, who saw the show for the first time when he was 10 years old.
“At the time it was the wildest thing I had ever seen,” recalled Solkær.
Over the next 40 years, Solkær built a career as a portrait photographer, traveling the globe to capture iconic images of the world’s biggest stars – Amy Winehouse, Metallica, Paul McCartney, and Led Zeppelin, to name a few. But during a career retrospective in 2017, Solkær was inspired to try something new.
“The first thing that came to mind was starling murmurations … 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 route.
Solkær’s latest photo book, “Starling,” published last month, outlines this migration journey, and with it, he hopes to encourage a closer relationship with nature.
“One reason it always amazes me is that it’s new, something unique every time it happens. The shapes that can be seen in the sky only happen once in the history of the world,” he said. “I think that’s a really good reason to photograph them and try to capture them and share them with others.”
A sunset show
Solkær first published images of the starling in his 2020 photobook “Black Sun,” describing it as “an investigation into 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, Solkær 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 as far south as North Africa in winter. The murmurations are most common during these migrations, although the exact reason behind them remains a mystery: a widely accepted theory is that starlings gather in these dense antenna formations before sunset to themselves to make more visible to predators. But scientists also suspect that it could attract other starlings to the roost and generate heat in the cold winters.
Using Instagram hashtags to find out where the murmurs were happening, Solkær chose his destinations based on the size of the flock and the presence of predators, such as peregrine falcons, because 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 short-lived: you can get five good pictures in half a minute, but you won’t get anything from that for six weeks,” said Solkær. “It doesn’t happen every night. The spectacular formations usually happen once or twice a winter.”
One of the largest winter populations settles in Rome, Italy. The urban landscape, as well as the southern evening light, provided a sharp contrast to Solkær’s work in the Danish marshes.
“It’s the same phenomenon but the light is much more golden, the sky is very beautiful,” Solkær explained. Although many of his previous shots of the murmurations had used a monochrome aesthetic, he began to play with color, as well as include architecture in some images.
Rome also provided the perfect backdrop for Solkær to explore the relationship between wild and urban environments, through the city’s difficult relationship with starlings.
“Rome spends a lot of money trying to scare the birds and get them out of the city, because they make a big mess,” he said, adding that the city hired a hawk to scare the birds away. close
Druids have been a stronghold in Rome ever since, however. “They thought that the shapes and behavior of the gods were the gods trying to communicate with people,” Solkær explained. Divers would read the good or bad signs that influenced political decisions. Solkær draws on this history of mysticism, beckoning with fantastic formations framed above the spiers of ancient architecture against a backdrop of pastel-cotton-candy clouds.
“It’s a very different experience when you’re standing in a field in the middle of nowhere. But I think it’s just as magical – it seems even more surreal when you’re in the city, watching the same thing happen. It doesn’t fit that well, and that is also the reason for the great struggle between the city of Rome and the birds,” said Solkær.
From macro to micro
Although starlings are often thought of as a common bird in Europe and North America, their numbers have declined over the years – a 53% drop between 1995 and 2018 – and in the UK they are on the Red List of threatened species.
“There are far fewer birds now than there used to be,” said Solkær, pointing out that the use of land for agriculture is increasing, which has reduced the available food.
After the success of “Black Sun,” many biologists and ornithologists went out to Solkær – encouraging him not only to observe the starlings from afar, but also.
In collaboration with the University of Copenhagen, he produced two sets of images shot through a microscope.
“They have really beautiful metallic feathers when you’re close,” said Solkær. “I’ve tried to go from the macro, macro world that I’ve seen in the sky, to see if I could find some of the same universal patterns if I were really close.”
One ornithologist — an octogenarian professor at the Natural History Museum — provided Solkær with taxidermy starch from the museum’s collection to take photographs.
“You could see from the little tag attached to his leg that he died in 1918 from flying into a lighthouse, (but still) he looked great,” Solkær said.
He photographed the bird under light and electron microscopes, magnifying the starling up to 12,000 times. The detailed images show the dense but delicate feather threads, which resemble the contours of maps, palm fronds, and tree trunks, providing a striking contrast to his open sky shots of the murmurations.
“The closer I got, the bigger it looked – like mountains and a river delta,” Solkær said.
The project sparked Solkær’s interest in other conservation photography projects. He is now starting a project about dragon blood trees, a rare species that is endemic to the island of Socotra, in the Indian Ocean, as well as a book about spirituality and nature in Bhutan, in South Asia.
“At this point, at least to me, it doesn’t make sense to focus on the rock stars,” he said. “I think it’s really important to tell these stories now, and to encourage a closer connection with nature.”
As for birds, Solkær is considering other species for possible projects: the sandpipers, for example, a gray bird with a white side that dances from the air like a starling; or Australia’s lurid green budgies, which stand in stark contrast to the red rocks of the outback and the extended blue sky.
“I don’t think I’ll do another starling book,” Solkær said. But he pauses, accepting himself: “Actually, I think in 10 days, I’ll be going to Sardinia to photograph the starlings. So who knows?”
Videos courtesy of Søren Solkær.
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