A murmuration of starlings

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

Filmed in Ireland, on the River Shannon, and posted at Vimeo, where it has garnered over 700 comments.  The video is particularly nice for the combination of the aerobatics, the music chosen to replace wind sounds, and the steady hand of the young woman filming from a canoe!

Still photos and a video of starlings in Scotland are also posted at Poemas del rio Wang.

How (and why) they do this is still a bit of a mystery.  The science is discussed at Wired Science.

Mathematical analysis of flock dynamics show how each starling’s movement is influenced by every other starling, and vice versa. It doesn’t matter how large a flock is, or if two birds are on opposite sides. It’s as if every individual is connected to the same network.

That phenomenon is known as scale-free correlation, and transcends biology. The closest fit to equations describing starling flock patterns come from the literature of “criticality,” of crystal formation and avalanches — systems poised on the brink, capable of near-instantaneous transformation.

What puzzles me is how they are able to sense the movement of the others, since birds don't have the lateral line sensors that some fish have.  I remember seeing immense flocks of starlings passing overhead above the parking place at my workplace in Indianapolis, Indiana many years ago - thousands and thousands of them, like a scene from the book Paradise Found (which I still need to write a post about).  Our concern in those years was that the roosts of those birds were sources of histoplasmosis.  But the flocks are truly amazing.

p.s. - re the word "murmur": Reduplication points to imitative, onomatopoeic origin. Cognate with Sanskrit मर्मर (marmara, “rustling sound, murmur”), Ancient Greek μορμύρω (mormúrō, “to roar, boil”), Lithuanian mùrmėti (“to mutter, murmur, babble”), Old High German murmurōn, murmulōn (“to mumble, murmur”), Old Norse murra (“to grumble, mumble”).