‘You get one split second’: The story behind a viral bird photo
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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.”
‘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.

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‘I’m very impulsive’: Why this American woman moved to France at the age of 70
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She’d dreamed of living in France for years, but according to Janice Deerwester, originally from Texas, life always seemed to get in the way.

In 2021, Janice, who has been a widow since 2012, found herself lying on her bed with the lyrics to “Is That All There Is?,” a song about dissatisfaction that was a hit for country singer Peggy Lee back in 1969, playing in her head.

“I hated that song when it came out, but all of a sudden it came to my mind,” Janice, who was based in Georgia at the time, tells CNN Travel. “I thought, ‘Is this all there is?’ I work, come home tired. I get up. Is this it?”
Realizing that she wanted more from life, Janice decided there and then that she would relocate to Fontainebleau — the French town she’d had her heart set on since a 2018 visit. Less than a year later, at the age of 70, she did just that.

“I’m very impulsive so that kind of followed the rule,” she adds.

Now happily settled in Fontainebleau, located southeast of Paris, Janice feels that she “made the best choice ever” and is incredibly grateful to be living out her fantasy.

“I am the luckiest woman I feel that ever was,” she says. ”And why I have this, and why I was given this, I have no idea. But I’m just blessed every day that I get to live here.”

Janice goes on to explain that she wasn’t necessarily unhappy back in Georgia, and enjoyed living on a horse ranch in the country, which she had been renting since selling her home, but was overcome with the feeling that “there’s got to be more” to life.