20160521 - murmuration

The incredible science behind starling murmurations

The aerial ballet the birds perform while flocking is mesmerizing to watch. But even more fascinating is the science behind how they are capable of such coordinated movement.

"That was freakin' awesome."
"Wow! What an experience that was."
"It's an awe-inspiring yet humbling first hand experience of nature. The way they move — it's like being able to watch the invisible flows of life energy."
These are just a few of the comments left on a video of a starling murmuration that went viral last year. And it's no surprise. If you've ever had the pleasure of seeing a flock of starlings fly together, then you know that it is like watching a shape-shifting cloud, a single being moving and twisting in unpredictable formations in the sky. But that single being is thousands, sometimes millions of individual birds. (And if you seen it, there's a great video at the bottom of this post.)
"It is so awesome that birds can make such coordinated changes en masse... The communication must be instantaneous," writes one commenter.
Well, not instantaneous but extraordinarily rapid. So fast that it leaves us staring in wonder. And that wonder is something that has captured the interest of scientists for a long time. Now that we have technology that can keep up with, and then slow down, the birds' activity, scientists are figuring out how they are capable of such coordinated movement. Here's what they've discovered.
As starlings gather in the evenings to roost, often they will participate in what is called a murmuration — a huge flock that shape-shifts in the sky as if it were one swirling liquid mass. Often the behavior is sparked by the presence of a predator like a hawk or peregrine falcon, and the flock's movement is based on evasive maneuvers. There is safety in numbers, so the individual starlings do not scatter, but rather are able to move as an intelligent cloud, feinting away from a diving raptor, thousands of birds changing direction almost simultaneously. The question that has had scientists stumped is how a bird, tens or hundreds of birds away from those nearest danger, sense the shift and move in unison?

 http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/stories/the-incredible-science-behind-starling-murmurations
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eakKfY5aHmY