This lovely and rare picture, a bird-shaped murmuration of starlings, is for real, and was entered (and won) the Vogelwarte annual contest of bird photography.
The details:
Common Starling | Daniel Biber“In the northeast of Spain, hundreds of thousands of Common Starlings gather at nighttime to sleep. While I was watching this spectacle, the billowing flock suddenly took the shape of a huge flying bird. What luck!”
h/t: Grania
Magnifique!
Fractabulous.
🙂
Enough to make you murmur.
They’re not very imaginative.
Glen Davidson
Indeed. I’ve done similar things myself.
On close examination, they obviously plagiarized M.C. Escher.
The other photos from the Vogelwarte contest are also pretty amazing.
It’s a miracle!
We have lots of starlings, and they do assemble in noisy flocks, but they don’t seem to have the populations to make the huge murmurations.
Mark sad.
Meta-fowl.
Incredible shot! The magic of fortuity.
We are pattern seeking critters, are we not?
Very cool, talk about life imitating art…
What an amazing photo!
It must rain droppings under those big murmurations.
At arm’s length the entire murmuration looks like a bird flying off to the right!
That is soooooo cool!!!😄
Lovely,
There is a commercial that shows a school of fish forming the shape of a big fish to scare off a shark, but that’s CGI (Computer Generated Imagery)like you see in the movies. This is the real thing. Crazy.
You wanted proof? Tell me God doesn’t exist now, you heathens.
OK, God doesn’t exist.
(Do I get a prize?)
This has got to be one of the most beautiful and poetically powerful images of all time.
LIFE!!
Pareidolia or photoshop? How to know?
Yeah, sadly, I trust no photo any more…
I’m freaked!!
Skynet becomes self aware.
majestic !
Bayesian statistician says: “Photoshop.”
Why?
Watch any video of murmurations and they take up all manner of shapes. This shape is just as likely and possible as any other. There’s nothing inherently improbable about it.
The photographer was just lucky to be watching at the right moment.
cr
Isn’t god wonderful?! LOL
That’s Nature for Ya! Always a Thriller! Very lucky photographer had that eye to the sky at the very best of times! 🙂 <3
Wowza! A bird of birds? Too cool