Starlings

The photographs in Starlings were made on one afternoon in December 2023 at Ham Wall, a wetland wildlife sanctuary managed by the RSPB in Somerset. The images show the stillness of late afternoon as the starlings fly in to roost. As the book progresses, thousands of birds are shown in full flight before disappearing with the coming of darkness.

It is thought that up to a million starlings roost at the Avalon Marshes at Ham Wall. Some of the birds inhabit the marshes year-round, and others migrate from colder countries in continental Europe as northern winter descends and contribute to this staggering number of birds. During the day they travel up to 20 miles to feed and return in the afternoon, an hour or so before sunset. Southam’s photographs capture the spectacle of the starling flocks populating the sky before flying down to roost for the night, leaving the skies empty once more.

‘A starling is, in short, exceedingly beautiful. Yet one reason we tend not to dwell on the otherness of starling aesthetics is the fact that they have come to live so close by us, nesting in our houses, feeding on our lawns, or across our rubbish dumps, or from garbage bins, or by the sprinklers at the sewage works, or on the motorway hard shoulder. Or they strut a roundabout island amid the rush-hour traffic. We are so habituated to their presence that, like everything else in our lives, we smear them over with our sense of the everyday. And they become ordinary. We have to look with real intent, as Jem Southam has done when taking his own starling images, to recover the sheer magic of our world.’

– Mark Cocker from the book’s essay.

Throughout his career Southam has photographed sites, predominantly in the South West of the UK, over extended periods of time and in diverse ways. Starlings is a departure from his previous work as it was made over the course of just one afternoon.

‘I now see myself as a storyteller, standing still with a camera, immersed in the continuum of time and space, making streams of still pictures. Each story is an individual study of the passage of time – the flood of a river, the collapse of a section of cliff, the passage of a single dawn or a long drawn out winter.’

– Jem Southam

Starlings will be the first book by the new imprint Raft, founded by Southam. Raft will publish small books focused on the natural world, drawing upon previously unseen work from the photographer’s archive. In each book the photographs will be accompanied by commissioned essays by contemporary nature writers. For this first book Mark Cocker’s essay draws upon the history, biology, myth and wonder of the often-overlooked starling.

Born in Bristol in 1950, Jem Southam’s work is housed in major collections including Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Museum Folkwang, Essen; the Yale Center for British Art, Newhaven; Tate and V&A, London; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. His work has been the subject of numerous international solo exhibitions notably, Tate St Ives (2004), V&A Museum, London (2006) and The Lowry, Salford (2009).

Mark Cocker was born in Buxton, Derbyshire in 1959. He studied English Literature at the University of East Anglia. An award-winning author and naturalist, he writes and broadcasts on wildlife in a variety of national media. His most recent book The Nature of Seeing (2026) is a celebration and exploration of the act of looking: how it shapes both the world and ourselves. His other books include A Claxton Diary: Further Field Notes from a Small Planet (2019) which won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award and Crow Country (2007) which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, and won the New Angle Prize.