Starlings is the first book by Raft, the new imprint founded by Jem Southam to publish small books on the natural world, drawing from previously unseen work in his archive and pairing it with commissioned essays by contemporary nature writers. The photographs capture the spectacle of starling flocks populating the sky before flying down to roost for the night, leaving the air empty once more. Mark Cocker's accompanying essay draws on the history, biology, myth and wonder of the often-overlooked bird. '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…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.'