Whatever those birds were doing yesterday, it wasn’t migrating. The sky was again filled with them as I got home today, so I grabbed my camera to get another few shots. I’m adding two in this post and I’ve put the rest in my photo gallery.

A man walking his dog noticed my interest in the birds and he was able to answer a few questions. The birds are starlings, which are very common in the Netherlands from spring to autumn, but shouldn’t be here this time of year. However, with the mild winter we’ve had, they never migrated south, and apparently that’s made them all restless. They spend most of the day in relative quiet, only to come out an hour or so before sunset to flutter and fly and swoop around like crazy. After sunset they all settle in a couple of trees to spend the night, and life repeats the next day. This has been going on for a few weeks now.

So, add starlings to the list of evidence that nature gets upset by global warming. A colleague already saw ducks mating last week, goats and sheep were born at the Amsterdam goat farm even earlier than that, and flowers are already beginning to bloom. I thought everything was early last year, but it’s even worse now.

Anyway, in addition to static pictures, I also shot a couple of video fragments of the starling swooping about. The video setting is not something I use a lot on my camera, but it seemed particularly well suited in this case. Unfortunately WordPress doesn’t let me put the video here directly, so you’ll have to click one of these links to watch:

• high quality video (640×480)
• medium quality video (480×360)
• low quality video (320×240)

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 at 00:03 and is filed under Photography, Weather. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.