I just had to pause and take in their energetic chattering and flurry of restless wings, as they seemingly exchanged ideas on where to go for breakfast today, basing their combined knowledge on yesterday's feeding forays out on the moss.

This sharing of information working in their mutual survival, for in the world of starlings survival is to do so together.

Possibly most of us will have seen, either in real life or on TV, how starling flocks in winter can mesmerise us as they twist and turn about the sky to such a degree that it’s impossible to follow one individual bird with our eyes. Yes, to us fascinating but equally baffling for a potential predator to seize an individual bird.

These clever birds in co-operating have found a strategy to survive the natural world. Sadly, our modern-day UK countryside, with its chemical crop spraying and too tidy, intensively farmed landscape, has possibly contributed to a 66 percent decline in the breeding population of these birds since the 1970s. It seems that the lack of insects in the breeding season offers less food for their young, hence less young produced.

But my encounter could quite easily be with birds wintering in the UK, having travelled from as far as Scandinavia, to enjoy our less , wintery weather than in their own country.

As for me I was more than happy to simply revel in watching their antics before they and I headed out on the moss.

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