A spectacular dusk starling flight, gathering and groupings, with silhouetted groups flying flocking, mumurate over Martin Mere nature reserve at sunset. Starlings in group migration, silhouette, swirling flight formation, flocks, swarm, wild birds flying shapes as an estimated 50 thousand starlings gather in the autumn sky. The murmur or chatter mumuration between the huge numbers of birds as they fly, is quite intense and is thought to be communication as huge flocks, the largest seen in the last for 12 years, are attract large numbers of wildlife birdwatchers to Burscough, UK.
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. 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 behaviour is sparked by the presence of a predator like a hawk or peregrine falcon, and the flock's movement is based on evasive 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? The secret lies in the same systems that apply to anything on the cusp of a shift, like snow before an avalanche, where the velocity of one bird affects the velocity of the rest. It is called "scale-free correlation" and every shift of the murmuration is called a critical transition. Giorgio Parisi, a theoretical physicist with the University of Rome, lead a research team looking into the amazing movement of starlings and published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2010.
Size: 3600px × 2400px
Location: Burscough, UK
Photo credit: © MediaWorldImages / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: -ordinated, aerial, bird, birds, birdwatching, british, clouds, coast, coastal, communal, display, displaying, displays, dusk, england, english, evening, flight, flock, flocks, flying, formation, grouping, iridescent-black, january, kingdom, lancashire, landscape, landscapes, migration, mumurating, mumuration, nature, ornithology, reserve, reserves, roost, roosting, roosts, shapes, silhouette, silhouetted, sites, speckled, starling, starlings, sturnus, sundown, sunset, sunsets, swarm, swarming, swarms, twilight, uk, united, vulgaris, weather, west, winter, wintering, wintertime, wwt
