A murmuration ~ Quel monde formidable!

 This is one of my “regular” country watch articles about “One of the most stunning examples of collective behaviour [in animals]” seen in the world, and we recently had the privilege to view this quite stunning aerial ballet, at close quarters and for some considerable time.

 After our exploits by the sea on New Year’s Eve (see Happy New Year 2013 blog post) where we failed in the darkness to actually find the water, the tide was well out!!  We decided to have a day off from house renovation and take a picnic to the seaside.  It being the depths of winter the picnic was more of a huddle in the car, buffeted by strong winds, whilst overlooking the windswept Anguillon bay, a huge muddy inlet north of La Rochelle and famed for seafood production and a wealth of marine bird life.

 After the picnic, we managed to find a considerable amount of driftwood, blown onto the piled up rocks of the extensive sea defences, by the winter’s gales.  With the car loaded with the makings of an artistic driftwood mirror and some left to burn in our log burner with the promise of a multicoloured flame show due to the salt deposited in the wood, we set off across the flat wide open reclaimed marshes that now border the bay and which must have in autrefois (olden days) have meant that the bay was considerable bigger. As we came around the low cliffs of one of a number of low lying islands, now scattered over the flat marshland like beached boats, there it was in front of us, a huge flock of choreographed starlings, twisting and pirouetting around the wide open sky, balletically moving as one complete, despite there being many thousands of individuals in the cast.  

What we were witnessing and marveling at was “the spectacular display of European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris), the noun for which is a murmuration," scientists Andrew King and David Sumpter said in a 2012 Current Biology report.  Their report continued:

“The mesmerizing act is typically seen at dusk throughout Europe, between November and February. Each evening, shortly before sunset, starlings can be seen performing breathtaking aerial manœuvres, before choosing a place to roost for the night. These range in number from a few hundred to tens of thousands of birds. Murmurations exhibit strong spatial coherence and show extremely synchronized manœuvres, which seem to occur spontaneously, or in response to an approaching threat.

According to Wired magazine, which cited a 2008 report about this animal behavior: "Each starling in a flock is connected to every other. When a flock turns in unison, it’s a phase transition. At the individual level, the rules guiding this are relatively simple. When a neighbour moves, so do you.”

I’m sure that for many of you the word murmuration will be a new word, it certainly is for me, and we found ourselves wondering, as we continued to marvel at the dexterity of this huge flock, as it performed initially in front of the car and subsequently all around us, what’s the trigger for such movements, as every so often the whole flock would land briefly on one of the nearby fields, before quite suddenly and unannounced swirling back into the air like a moving “painting on the sky”, as one appreciative netizen described the amazing bird ballet.  (I guess murmuration was new to many of you, but what about “netizen,” the google spellchecker certainly doesn’t recognise it.  I can only assume that it is a play on the label internet citizen!)

Hence, reference to various pieces of research done into this phenomena and quoted above.  This research is largely inconclusive, and to date no-one has come up with a definitive answer for the behaviour.  However, imagine my surprise when just a week or two later, I was reading an article out of Country Walking magazine, about Icons of England.  The particular part of the larger article was written about George Alagiah, I’m sure known to most of you as a journalist and television news presenter and entitled “A Place in the Country”.  Now, some time later I’m at a loss as to what his Icon of England was as the article has long gone up in smoke, helping to light the woodburner and maybe I’m thinking HE WAS THE ICON!  But in the article he talks about a theory for the art of murmuration. He says that why the starlings “twist and turn in unison, is because the ones on the outside are constantly trying to get to the inside where they feel safer.”  Now in the absence of anything else more convincing, that explanation will do for me!!