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Nov. 19th, 2014 at 10:20 AM
Murmuration
Every autumn around this time in the British skies sees the start of an amazing natural spectacle that carries on throughout the winter, the gatherings of starlings in murmurations over the forests and fields that are beginning their winter's rest. As they fly in clouds of tens of thousands of individual birds, the interactions of the murmuration produce amazing shifting patterns in the air as shown in the videos linked below. As they return from their feeding sites to the evening's roost in the darkening dusk, spectacular aerial ballets darken the British skies, in this case near Gretna green in Scotland.
While the reasons for these jaw dropping gatherings is unknown, speculation includes safety in numbers from predatory birds by presenting the falcon with so many moving spots that they get hypnotised. They also gather to keep each other warm against the chilly British weather, and possibly to exchange information about productive feeding areas nearby. They circle around until they pick a roosting place, usually as sheltered as possible from both weather and predators picking such locales as woodland, reedbeds, cliffs and buildings.
No one knows how they coordinate as a flock though a combination of computer modelling and automated video analysis have revealed amazing patterns more familiar from the world of physics than the living realm. Their movements are described by the same equations that describe systems oscillating around a tipping point allowing for rapid structural fluctuations, more commonly encountered in liquids as they reach boiling point and begin to evaporate or the magnetisation of metals. Each time the murmuration wheels together, the flock is undergoing a phase transition, though how the birds are connected by natural laws remains unknown.
Each bird obviously follows the movements of its immediate neighbours and the large scale pattern fluctuates, but no one knows how the flock manages to somehow remain oscillating around the tipping point enabling the entire group to wheel nearly as one unit. They may in fact be the tip of an iceberg that may reveal a whole new branch of science, that describing the large scale organisation of organisms and its oscillations around equilibrium points, as posited for example in Gaia theory and many ideas (both current and discredited) about the organisation of human societies. Similar patterns also appear in proteins and neurons firing in nervous systems.
Whatever the truth, and I'm sure it will prove exciting, a murmuration in flight remains one of the best sights that Nature has to offer our eyes.
(Source: The Earth Story FB page)
Comments
The photo you shared does look like a UFO!!! ;)
And yes, it does look rather like an UFO, doesn't it ;)