Murmurations:
Talk about connectedness!
There’s hardly a more mesmerizing, fascinating event in nature than a murmuration. Maybe the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights. While the term is reserved for the incredible performance of common starlings, often hundreds of thousands of them, which I have never seen, I’ve witnessed smaller flocks of birds, pigeons maybe, fly with the same stunning coordination, and was completely blown away!
When you watch the video above, you’ll understand where the name comes from: it’s based on the medieval Latin word murmuratio, meaning murmuring or grumbling. A perfectly onomatopoeic word – it suggests the sound that it describes. This is one of a few videos I found which didn’t add a mindless soundtrack but lets us listen to the eerie beauty of the birds’ flight – it reminded me of ocean waves.
It almost looks like a carefully choreographed dance. But imagine what it would take to get a few thousand people to move like this, to get closer, to flow apart, to swirl around each other in such an amazingly beautiful fashion, and they don’t even have the extra dimension which the starlings have. How in the world do the birds achieve this? And why?
There’s no definitive answer to the second question. Scientists have posited that murmurations act as a defense against predators. Peregrine falcons do indeed attack starlings, but the counter-argument can be made that the bold display of such a large number of birds, which typically lasts for 45 minutes, actually draws a predator’s attention. Another theory suggests that body heat is involved: the starlings have a central roosting site, and more birds would mean that the roosting spot is warmer, especially in winter. However, the largest roosts can be found in late summer, when it’s not particularly cold. Definitive answers to “why” the birds congregate and perform their mysterious dance have not been found yet.
The “how” question has been answered with more certainty, at least in part. The first scientist who did serious studies of the coordinated flight of a flock of starlings was the British ornithologist and writer Edmund Selous (1857 - 1934), who explained the extraordinary precision of murmurations with thought-transference. Needless to say, telepathy didn’t sit well with the scientific establishment and Selous never really became an accepted member. Actually, he was ahead of his time: he was strongly opposed to the common practice of scientific bird study which consisted of collecting dead specimens (and more often than not killing them) in order to measure and examine them. Selous vociferously advocated bird watching and non-destructive bird study.
For myself, I must confess that I once belonged to this great, poor army of killers, though happily, a bad shot, a most fatigable collector, and a poor half-hearted bungler, generally. But now that I have watched birds closely, the killing of them seems to me as something monstrous and horrible; and, for every one that I have shot, or even only shot at and missed, I hate myself with an increasing hatred.
he wrote in 1901.1 He made bird-watching popular and actually coined the term birdwatcher. Not surprisingly, however, Selous’s hypothesis that thought-transference was the cause of murmurations never found transaction amongst professional scientists.
More recent attempts to explain HOW the birds manage their exquisite performances involve computer programming. In 1987 the computer graphics expert Craig Reynolds created a simulation of a flock of birds which he called “boids”. His creatures obeyed three simple rules: When boids came too close, they’d move further apart; they would align their direction and speed; and the more distant boids would move closer. His model has been used in a number of Hollywood movies because it is so lifelike.
Explanation for the three graphs above: 1. Separation: steer to avoid crowding local flockmates. 2. Alignment: steer towards the average heading of local flockmates. 3. Cohesion: steer to move toward the average position of local flockmates.
Since then, more advanced studies have established a “rule of seven”: the movement of every individual bird was ruled by the seven nearest neighbors. Does this sound simple? Not to me; it doesn’t really explain how one slight change in movement on one edge can be picked up almost instantaneously by the birds on the opposite edge, with hundreds of thousands of individuals in-between. Maybe there IS some telepathy involved? I, for one, wouldn’t think this is impossible.
One thing seems absolutely certain: there is no leader. There is no one individual who acts as the authority and tells all the others what to do. There is nobody with a plan that others have to follow. Besides their stunning beauty, this is the other reason why I love murmurations so much. Scientists call this collective animal behavior, and I think humans could learn a lot from such a model. It reminds me of superorganisms such as bees: the individual acts in a way that is best for the common good. We humans have learned to be self-conscious: we can say “I like fast cars”, “I hate spinach”, “I love my sister”, “I’m afraid of spiders”. I know my name and I’m absolutely certain about who and what is “me” and what is “not-me”. For human growth and culture this self awareness is essential, but it would be a fallacy and detrimental to further development if we stay there. It may extend to my family and my tribe, but the “us-versus-them” mentality is ultimately destructive. It’s the cause of every conflict and war.
How can we learn that to be an individual doesn’t have to mean that one is the all-important center of the universe, but that one is part of a community of countless beings and entities? That my personal well-being is ultimately dependent on the well-being of all other creatures? Humanity’s survival may possibly rely on this…
Very interesting article of a fascinating natural phenomenon that is a wonder to behold, thank you Jessica 😊🥰.
An amazing fact about murmuration is that starlings are the only species of birds who do it. Other birds flock together in large numbers and produce a similar visual effect, but their in-flight crowds lack the defining ‘murmur’ sound which makes a murmuration so iconic.
Sadly, while flocking can keep birds safe from predators, it does make them extremely susceptible to hunting and diseases.
Thanks 👍😊💖