‘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 v