A Murmuration Of Starlings

A flock of birds, even a skein of geese perhaps -- but a cete of badgers, or a grist of bees? The collective nouns of animals and birds have long inspired and intrigued us. Many have their roots in medieval times, in particular applied to those creatures hunted by man, and subject to the etiquette of their proper group names. Author Steve Palin has beautifully illustrated and given the background to about fifty different animals and birds with interesting collective nouns -- and listed 420 of them in his glossary. This elegant little book will appeal to all those with a fascination for the English language, those who want the answers for quizzes and crossword puzzles, and those with an interest in animals and birds.

A Murmuration of Starlings elegizes the martyrs of the civil rights movement, whose names are inscribed on the stone table of the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. Individually, Jake Adam York’s poems are elegies for individuals; collectively, they consider the violence of a racist culture and the determination to resist that racism. York follows Sun Ra, a Birmingham jazz musician whose response to racial violence was to secede from planet Earth, considers the testimony in the trial of J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant for the murder of Emmet Till in 1955, and recreates events of Selma, Alabama, in 1965. Throughout the collection, an invasion of starlings imagesthe racial hatred and bloodshed. While the 1950s spawned violence, the movement in the early 1960s transformed the language of brutality and turned the violence against the violent, says York. So, the starlings, first produced by violence, become instruments of resistance. York’s collection responds to and participates inrecent movements to find and punish the perpetrators of the crimes that defined the civil rights movement. A Murmuration of Starlings participates in the search for justice, satisfaction, and closure.

On May 27th, 1784, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart met a flirtatious little starling in a Viennese shop who sang an improvised version of the theme from his Piano Concerto no. 17 in G major. Sensing a kindred spirit in the plucky young bird, Mozart bought him and took him home to be a family pet. For three years, the starling lived with Mozart, influencing his work and serving as his companion, distraction, consolation, and muse. Two centuries later, starlings are reviled by even the most compassionate conservationists. A nonnative, invasive species, they invade sensitive habitats, outcompete local birds for nest sites and food, and decimate crops. A seasoned birder and naturalist, Lyanda Lynn Haupt is well versed in the difficult and often strained relationships these birds have with other species and the environment. But after rescuing a baby starling of her own, Haupt found herself enchanted by the same intelligence and playful spirit that had so charmed her favorite composer. In Mozart's Starling, Haupt explores the unlikely and remarkable bond between one of history's most cherished composers and one of earth's most common birds. The intertwined stories of Mozart's beloved pet and Haupt's own starling provide an unexpected window into human-animal friendships, music, the secret world of starlings, and the nature of creative inspiration. A blend of natural history, biography, and memoir, Mozart's Starling is a tour de force that awakens a surprising new awareness of our place in the world.

In today's fast-food world, Christianity can seem outdated or archaic. The temptation becomes to pick up the pace and play the game. But Chris Smith and John Pattison invites us to leave franchise faith behind and enter the kingdom of God, where people know each other well and love one another as Christ loves the church.

Murmuration is a year's worth of emotions, anxious thoughts and panic attacks, each one a beating wing in the mind of the author. Fans are saying: "Beautiful inside and out", "Lovingly designed", "One of the best poetry books I've read so far." Murmuration is an attempt to create something beautiful from this chaos; to make sense of the things we dare not breathe to life. Focusing on loss, heartbreak, mental health, and the impact of isolation on a tired mind, these poems are the starlings that gather above the water. These pages are the hope that we can learn to heal; that the future can survive the past.

On a summer's day in 2009 Neyra Alarcon de Alba walks home with some friends in her Mexican town of Magdalena de Kino. But Neyra Alarcon de Alba never makes it home. Neyra Alarcon will not be seen alive again. Seven years later, on October 11, 2016, the body of a young woman, mutilated, raped, unidentifiable, is found in a Brooklyn New York warehouse. She is not the first victim. She will not be the last. For former FBI agent Ryker Chase, her death, like the death of a Mexican girl seven years earlier, will push him to the limits of his understanding, and his fear. Chase has inherited abilities that he never wanted, never sought: the talents of a Shadow Wolf ICE agent stretching well beyond the training of these Native American trackers who use traditional tracking techniques for Federal Law Enforcement agencies working in the West. But he has also inherited the ability to 'see' into shadows, and into that which cannot be seen, the arts of the dream catcher, the shadow arts of one who becomes, who tracks not only with one's head, but with one's heart. While Chase tries to hide from such knowledge and vision, he cannot hide forever. Not when there are 'Others' whose existence is beyond the everyday, shadow figures such as the 'Third Man', who toys with one such as Chase, who haunts him and taunts him, who may indeed be his own twin 'other'. Chase's world is a one in which the duality of good and evil collide, where one man is but a shadow of another, a world of Native American duality in which the dark cannot exist without light, and where a Shadow Wolf may indeed be once, and forever, shadow. In such a world some are sacrificed, and for one such as Chase, a glance in a mirror reveals the twin self looking over a shoulder, waiting.... there. Working in similar milieus to such films as 'Silence of the Lambs', 'The Usual Suspects', 'The Bone Collector' against a Cormac McCarthy like landscape, 'A Murmuration of Starlings' is the first novel of the 'The Shadow Wolf Chronicles', adapted from the television series developed by Greg Dinner in association with Content Film and Television in Los Angeles and London.

A Conspiracy of Ravens presents readers with a compendium of collective bird nouns from the distant and not-so-distant past. This book collects more than one hundred of the best and most imaginative expressions and illustrates them with charming woodcuts by the eighteenth-century artist and naturalist Thomas Bewick.

For the first time since he'd left the island he thought of the starlings massed at dusk in the winter trees behind the children's home. He remembered the rustle of their wings when they twisted in skeins over the fields, or swelled and contracted high above the cliffs, dark wave after dark wave, lifting and falling in a kind of dance. Sister Lucy had said it was a murmuration. He was still quite young, and he had thought the birds were showing him a sign, that there was something written in their fluid patterns. Lives merge and diverge; they soar and plunge, or come to rest in impenetrable silence. Erris Cleary's absence haunts the pages of this exquisite novella, a woman who complicates other lives yet confers unexpected blessings. Fly far, be free, urges Erris. Who can know why she smashes mirrors? Who can say why she does not heed her own advice? Among the sudden shifts and swings, the swerving flight paths taken, something hidden must be uncovered, something dark and rotten, even evil, which has masqueraded as normality. In the end it will be a writer's task to reclaim Erris, to bear witness, to sound in fiction the one true note that will crack the silence.