Murmuration.

Most of us have seen film or watched real-life flocks of starlings change direction in mid-flight, morphing into fantastic three dimensional shapes. It’s natural to ask, how do they do this together? And equally, why?  This synchronized aerial dance is given an uncommon name, murmuration, which leaves most spellcheckers curled into a fetal position wondering, what fowl trick is this? I am only clever once per day, so please pay a small tithing to Henry, God of Puns.

As kids we would play the game of Telephone, where one child would whisper the secret phrase or sentence into the ear of the child to left (“Fred is weird”), who would repeat what they heard to the child to their left and so on, until the last child (Fred) is asked to repeat what they heard (“Feeglebop”), much to the merriment of all and relief to some. A physicist would say that in the game of Telephone the signal-to-noise ratio is low, meaning lots of noise and little signal.

In a murmurating flock of starlings the signal-to-noise ratio is very high and this allows for a small motion left or right or up or down by one bird to be instantly mimicked by neighboring birds — and thus the message traverses the flock almost perfectly and the birds don’t collide. And what is this mysterious message?  Since murmuration almost always occurs in the presence of a nearby predator, it seems to be, “there is a hawk nearby”.  Without the high signal-to-noise ratio half the birds might hear, “Let’s get some french fries”, leading to some rather frenzied transactions at the drive-thru. Murmuration allows the entire flock to conduct evasive maneuvers and not leave some poor devil who zigged when he should have zagged hanging out there destined to *become* a happy meal.

One more odd thing about murmuration. There does not seem to be a leader or conductor of the flock. Any single bird at any moment can initiate this real time choreography, which might account for the extraordinary swirling complexities of the flock.