The Birds

The flow of water across a giant expanse of featureless mud is pushing hundreds of thousands of birds in motion. The lunar clock shrinks the stage minute by minute, setting in place the start of a battle, or maybe a dance, between a mass gathering of a million sea birds and a single super-speed predator.

Martin Dohrn is floundering in the mud contemplating the twilight of his career.  He set out over two years ago to use his considerable camera skills to try to decipher this little-known wildlife event on his own doorstep, off the East coast of England.

The Wash is a bleak, featureless expanses of mud in Norfolk, which - under grey British skies is the very last place you would expect to find anything much of interest, let alone the secrets of a “cosmic spectacle - as incredible as anything I ever seen anywhere”.   But it is here that he has taken it upon himself to record some insight into the evolutionary mechanisms of nature, and like a Victorian collector of old, Martin must unravel the process of the event piece by piece. 

Starting with the elements of mud and water, he delves knee-deep into the metropolis of worms, molluscs and crustaceans to steep himself in the building blocks of this world that can provide such a haven for over 2 million wading sea-birds.

His dogged fascination to record the gathering of these birds, and their relationship with one super speed female falcon, builds into an obsession, and slowly his collection of images and behaviours, revealing new meaning in the mesmeric, mind-bending murmurating shapes that twist and turn in response to the hunting peregrine.  

“This is the knife edge of Evolution” it’s like a “ballet of the birds” where they are both players and spectators in a life and death drama that has been written over millions of years.  Martin’s decision to dissect frame by frame the relationship between The Birds and the falcon and then re-construct the whole event into this single film provides us with a uniquely beautiful big-screen portrait of an evolutionary happening with important insights into the mechanisms of natural world, as well as a poignant glimpse into the psyche of one man as he faces up to the end of his professional life.