Is that a murmur I hear?

Much more detail large

Several of my blips of late have been drug induced. Well at least in that they have been induced by my having time to kill while waiting the pharmacist to fill a prescription for my 16 month old daughter. She is on the mend I think, we now have antibiotics again as she still has 2 ear infections, but at least she did not turn out to have pneumonia as the doctor feared at one point last week.

I stand to be corrected here but I believe this shot is of a murmur of starlings? I haven?t actually looked at the birds close enough yet to know if they are starlings but seeing this sight in the sky lit up the neurons in my head that said "That?s a murmur of starlings I think."

It was flying around as I waited for my wife to emerge from purchasing envelopes at Staples (yes, our life is that exciting).

After she returned to the car the 4 of us sat and watched the show a while to kill some time and I was taking a few pictures. We parked about a hundred feet away from the trees the birds were landing on between their little shows. At one point they flew right over us on their way up and there was a sudden sound like large hailstones hitting the car and I looked down to see a chunk of bright red berry from a nearby tree on my hand and more all over the windscreen. The berry appeared to have passed through the birds digestive system before it deposited it on me and my car. Luckily there wasn?t any on the camera. The splatters really did seem to be centered on our car and on the parts nearest the open window I was shooting photos of them through. I guess they didn?t want to be on blip. Or shall I count the stains all over the car as their signing of a model release form?
The shot was taken with the 55-250mm zoom as it was what I had on my camera. I would have liked to get some shots of the entire "swarm" as it moved around but the lens did no go wide enough and I didn?t want to change the lens and miss the show.

I've put 2 of the pics of Picasa...

Todays blip and the other shot I considered for todays blip.

I chose todays blip in the end because of the wave of color spreading left to right as the swarm turned.