Water Wings

Can a baby starling swim? This is not a question I’d ever asked, until I saw one fall into the River Nidd yesterday. Luckily I had a camera in my hand at the time:

You might need a good connection to view that video. I tried to reduce the bitrate, but it came out too blocky and spoiled it when I went too far. The quality of the original video (96MiB of it at the original resolution of 1280×720) is amazing. It was recorded on a Panasonic DMC-ZS3, which I think is a superb almost-pocket-sized camera, the only downside being a shortage of manual controls. Unfortunately the cameraman wasn’t of the same quality, but you get the idea – after a few seconds of pondering its predicament, the baby starling can indeed swim.

Note to self: I converted the video using the following command:

ffmpeg -i /shares/pictures/2010/2010-05-29/P1010955.MOV -ar 22050 -s 400x226 -qscale 5 -f flv waterwings.flv

Next question – do they like swimming. I think the expression on its face says it all:

It let me get very close to take that picture. I suspect it sat on that rock for a long time, drying out and coming to its senses. Again, only the original uncompressed image at 3648×2746 really does the camera justice, but the version I’ve butchered for the web doesn’t look so bad either. Click it twice to get to the 1024×768 version. Any arguments that it’s not a starling will be happily accepted if you know better – I’m not 100% sure.