A Similar Incident in the UK in 2019Ī similar incident occurred in December 2019 in the UK when roughly 225 starlings were discovered dead on a back road. “You can see that they act like a wave at the beginning, as if they are being flushed from above.”Įxperts also say that because flocking birds may follow the flight patterns of nearby birds instead of being aware of the landscape around them, tightly packed flocks may sometimes risk colliding with structures or even the ground. “This looks like a raptor like a peregrine or hawk has been chasing a flock, like they do with murmurating starlings, and they have crashed as the flock was forced low,” Broughton says. Richard Broughton of the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, tells the Guardian that he is 99% sure the flock was trying to escape a predatory bird and had been chased into the ground.
Drone robotics might take note of how the birds are able to coordinate based on visual cues.Photo by La Policía Seccional de Álvaro. The model could be used outside wildlife biology, too. A successful model that predicts starling movements could have a range of applications, he adds–from air traffic control to construction to murmuration bird poop clean-up. “If you’re part of a flock of 300,000 birds, the guys at the far end of the flock are just silhouettes, so what the bird sees is just going to be a pattern of silhouettes,” he says.Īfter returning to the University of Warwick to analyze the footage, Pearce found that the ratio of light-to-dark spaces on the camera could be predicted by his computer simulation. That’s when he discovered that light-dark patterns might inform the birds’ movements. “I just started by guessing–I’ll just have a couple of goes, see what I come up with,” Pearce tells me over Skype. The third rule is that the birds can make mistakes. Somehow, with each bird drawn to entropy, the entire flock moves in a semi-cohesive shape.
Instead, the birds are drawn to the most “complex” patterns, Pearce explains–the most disordered patches of light and dark in the whole structure. Similarly, birds won’t want to go to the lightest bits, characterized by sky, or they’ll detach from the flock entirely. If you think of a murmuration as a giant cloud of starlings, each bird won’t want to move to the densest, darkest part–otherwise, looking out from within the cloud would become impossible. But the second rule dictates that a starling must maintain a certain pattern of light and dark in its field of vision. First, each starling does whatever its neighbor is doing: If starling A bears right, so will starling B. The way Pearce explains it, the starlings are governed by three basic rules. Then, to test his theory, he set up a camera on the beach of a burnt-down pier and popular starling hangout in Brighton and captured murmurations at dawn and dusk.
In doing so, British PhD candidate Daniel Pearce was able to create a computer simulation of arrows that mimicked the birds’ movement. But one theoretical physicist may have pinned down one of the most accurate explanations yet, now published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. How they do it is an ongoing investigation.
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