By his own admission, James Crombie knew “very, very little” about starlings before Covid-19 struck. An award-winning sports photographer by trade, his only previous encounter with the short-tailed birds occurred when one fell into his fireplace after attempting to nest in the chimney of his home in the Irish Midlands.

“I always had too much going on with sport to think about wildlife,” said Crombie, who has covered three Olympic Games and usually shoots rugby and the Irish game of hurling, in a Zoom interview.

With the pandemic bringing major events to a halt, however, the photographer found himself at a loose end. So, when a recently bereaved friend proposed visiting a nearby lake to see flocks of starlings in flight (known as murmurations), Crombie brought along his camera — one that was conveniently well-suited to the job.

“You get one split second,” he said of the similarities between sport and nature photography. “They’re both shot at relatively high speeds and they’re both shot with equipment that can handle that.”

On that first evening, in late 2020, they saw around 100 starlings take to the sky before roosting at dusk. The pair returned to the lake — Lough Ennell in Ireland’s County Westmeath — over successive nights, choosing different vantage points from which to view the birds. The routine became a form of therapy for his grieving friend and a source of fascination for Crombie.

“It started to become a bit of an obsession,” recalled the photographer, who recently published a book of his starling images. “And every night that we went down, we learned a little bit more. We realized where we had to be and where (the starlings) were going to be. It just started to snowball from there.”

Photographer James Crombie estimates that he visited the lake, on average, 100 evenings a year over a four-year period.

James Crombie

‘I’ve got something special here’

Scientists do not know exactly why starlings form murmurations, though they are thought to offer collective protection against predators, such as falcons. The phenomenon can last from just a few seconds to 45 minutes, sometimes involving tens of thousands of individual birds. In Ireland, starlings’ numbers are boosted during winter, as migrating flocks arrive from breeding grounds around Western Europe and Scandinavia.

Crombie often saw the birds form patterns and abstract shapes, their varying densities appearing like the subtle gradations of paint strokes. The photographer became convinced that, with enough patience, he could capture a recognizable shape.

After more than a month, he snapped a perfectly timed image in which a murmuration resembled the leafy crown of a bare-branched tree on the lakeshore. “I thought that was the shot,” he recalled.

The two friends kept returning, nonetheless. Then, around the 50th night, something even more remarkable happened.

A video, taken by Crombie’s friend, shows the precise moment thousands of starlings fleetingly appear as one, a curved, winged form reflected in the water below. A flurry of camera shutter clicks can be heard in the background before Crombie exclaims, “That looked like a bird!”

The moment the starlings created a bird-shaped formation, as captured by the photographer’s friend Colin Hogg. Colin Hogg

The photographer had captured a rapid-fire sequence of more than 60 images, seven of which showed the huge bird formation. Yet there was one that stood out from the rest.

“I knew, once I clicked it, that I had it,” Crombie said, recalling how he returned to his car and saved the photo to various backup locations. “I contacted one or two people straight away and said, ‘I think I’ve got something pretty special here.’”

The image quickly went viral online, appearing in magazines and on the front page of a national newspaper, the Irish Times. It has since appeared on a bank’s annual report, a cafe mural in Australia and the shutter doors of a Norwegian building, according to Crombie.

The photographer said the picture had a huge impact on his career and profile. But it was just the beginning for Crombie. What began as a welcome distraction for his friend (who, when Covid restrictions lifted, “returned to the real world”, leaving Crombie to befriend a local farmer to accompany him instead) became an “addiction” that consumed four years of Crombie’s life and resulted in an estimated half a million photos.

Around 200 of the photos appear in his book, “Murmurations,” which combines the mesmerizing forms with close-ups and scenic shots of Lough Ennell. And while he has long been back documenting professional sport, Crombie hopes he might, one day, be able to shoot wildlife full-time.

“I’m still going (to the lake), even though I promised my wife that, once the book was published, the project was finished,” he admitted, arguing that the hobby is more productive than “going to the pub or playing golf.”

“There could be a lot worse ways to spend two hours in the evening.”