Apophenia

Is it just me, or are the starlings drawing a starling here? Assuming you can see them - it was virtually dark when I took this photo, which is the last of my keepers from this evening. There's something strange about standing in a garden centre car park next to a motorway junction, with heavy traffic ploughing past in both directions, while one of nature's great spectacles unfurls above the industrial estate on the other side of the road. But I haven't seen a murmuration for a while, and even though this was nothing like my best murmuration experience, it was still a thrill to be there as thousands of starlings gathered to roost.

As sometimes happens, the huge flock that's been reported over the village for the past few days split tonight, and it looked as though the larger portion found a roost site somewhere on the other side of Ashchurch  - Kemerton, possibly, or maybe Bredon. But unlike some of the other people in the garden centre car park, I stayed put and didn't go haring off to try to find the other flock, and I haven't seen anything posted on social media tonight to make me think that this was the wrong decision.

My second photo tonight is about as much of a contrast as you could get to the main image - and the experience of taking it, in my quiet, sunny and (relatively) warm back garden this afternoon, was very different to shooting a murmuration in the cold and dark of Ashchurch, with the roar of traffic all around. As a keen observer and recorder of solitary bees I'm generally a bit dismissive of honey bees, but the sight of this worker collecting pollen from the catkins on one of our hazel trees - and sending up little clouds of it every time she landed - was simply irresistible. For the record, and providing more evidence that spring is on its way, I also saw a Bombus terrestris queen in the garden today, and photographed a female Meliscaeva auricollis, which is my first hoverfly of the year.

By the way, if you're wondering about the title of this post, apophenia is the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things - such as seeing dogs or whales (or starlings) in a starling murmuration, or a face on the surface of the moon. It's harmless fun of course, but there can be a dark side: psychologists say that it's apophenia that leads to superstitions, and the birth of conspiracy theories.