WHAT’S IN A NAME?
A murmuration of starlings
THE TERM, ‘MURMURATION OF STARLINGS’, derives from the medieval Latin word for grumbling and the reference to starlings most likely comes from the sound of the very large groups that the birds form at dusk, with a murmuration reckoned to comprise an ongoing background murmur such as that caused by the beating of 10,000 pairs of wings at once. Their other collective noun is a ‘chattering’.