Twitchers were given a treat when thousands of starlings performed a tea-time spectacular, forming shapes like dolphins, a huge gorilla and even, perhaps, a giant bird.
The amazing sight of up to 10,000 starlings doing an aerial dance – known as a murmuration and probably a form of defence – was visible for around 20 minutes at dusk near Gretna, close to the English-Scottish border.
They were shot by Press Association photographer Owen Humphreys, who said: “The shapes they formed were spectacular... ‘As well as the sight, the noise of them flying was remarkable.”
Good catch
A woman who jumped 13.7 metres from the upper stand of an American football stadium was saved by a man who caught her.
Donnie Navidad said he urged the woman not to jump at Oakland Raiders’ stadium in California, but when she ignored him he braced himself to catch her.
Mr Navidad suffered a badly bruised arm but the woman is in hospital in a critical condition.
No refuge
An immigrant to New Zealand has lost his claim that he should be given refugee status because climate change is threatening his island home country.
Ioane Teitiota and his wife moved to New Zealand from the low-lying Pacific island of Kiribati in 2007. He argued that rising sea levels made it too dangerous for him and his family to return.
An appeal judge said Mr Teitiota did not fit the definition of a refugee under international guidelines because he was not being directly persecuted.
Precious find
An unknown oil sketch by John Constable, one of Britain’s best-loved artists, has been discovered at the Victoria & Albert Museum.
The work, depicting trees underneath an unsettled sky, painted on canvas measuring 24.5cm x 39.4cm, was found concealed beneath a lining canvas on the back of Branch Hill Pond: Hampstead, another work by the English Romantic painter.
Conservators at the V&A, which was given the remaining contents of Constable’s studio by the painter’s last surviving child, Isabel, in 1888, found the sketch while attempting to remove the lining on the reverse after it became loose. Constable, who died in London in 1837, probably painted the scene in the late summer of 1821 or 1822.