Tw**t sent via Matthew Cobb (BTW, if you get the New York Review of Books, my ex-student Allen Orr gave Matthew’s new book a very favorable review, and Orr is hard to please!). These synchronized patterns of starling motion, in this case resembling a tornado, are one of the marvels of nature:
A murmuration of starlings: pic.twitter.com/RU0VCIvOVe
— jeremiah jacques (@js_jacques) May 12, 2016
Wonderful, in the true sense of the word!
The murmuration of starlings is indeed one of the wonders of nature. But don’t fish form such aggregations all the time? And some shorebirds in migration do almost as well. Have all these flocking behaviors evolved for similar reasons (e.g. confusing predators)?
Eric- YES! When you see a clumped distribution of animals- this is usually indicative of predator advoidance.
If only Jesus’s face appeared in the murmuration, we could make some real $$.
😀
Or, if we could claim that they spoke with Hitchens just before he died…
They’d have to write a book for that one. It’d be an interesting book tour: “come see the mendacious murmurations”.
Reblogged this on The Write Idea.
Unbelievable!
Incredible!
There seems to be a predator attacking the flock repeatedly.
Even though predator avoidance may be a factor, these starling mumurations usually involved wintering birds going to an evening roost. Although the UK birds have gotten most of the attention, I’ve seen similar gyrations in Rome and probably they occur elsewhere as well. However I haven’t seen any evidence that the starlings on this side of the ocean (where they are introduced) do the same thing. There is (or was) a big roost of winter starlings in NYC on the Hudson River at about 125th Street. I wonder if anyone has observed their gyrations before settling down to an evening roost?
Eric S.