Birdwatching

The twenty-third entry is la nuvola di storni, the cloud of starlings that folds and turns over a reedbed at dusk, and it is the one place on this page where English is the more ornamental language. Italian names the thing plainly. Lo stormo is the flock, and when the flock is doing that, you simply say what you see: a cloud of them. English has instead a small inherited stock of collective phrases, one to a species, fixed by tradition rather than by sense — « a murmuration of starlings », « an exaltation of larks », « a charm of goldfinches », « a murder of crows ». They were coined in the late-medieval hunting books, they cannot be made up afresh, and not one of them can be worked out from the bird. Italian does sort its collectives, but by kind of creature rather than by species — uno stormo for birds, un branco for wolves, uno sciame for bees — and it stops there. The consequence is one-sided: lo stormo is « a flock » and needs no ceremony, while « a murmuration » has no single Italian word and must be described.