Starling moon

My apologies for blipping a second successive murmuration blip. I went back again with Wifie, and although it was good, it wasn't awe inspiring like last night's. The flock never reached anything like the same size, and it was clear that sub-flocks were settling quite quickly into the reedbeds.

My point in blipping this one is to show that there is a pattern in the seeming chaos of hundreds and thousands of birds in flight. The question is often asked as to why they don't collide with one another? It seems that each bird has an awareness of the location of just a few of the nearest birds to it, and it responds to the movements of those birds, always maintaining a minimum distance from its nearest neighbours. In this shot there are glimpses of this, V shapes and offset lines. A clearer picture is harder as the two dimensional image loses the three dimensional depth of the flock, and birds that appear close may be at different altitudes to each other.

That said, it is no less extraordinary that the coordinated movements of a groups of 5 to 6 birds relative to each other can be scaled up to a wheeling and gyrating murmuration of tens of thousands. We had an interesting conversation with another starling watcher as to whether one flock or part of the overall flock would actually fly through another flock. He was certain this would not happen, or surely there would be collisions. But it does raise interesting questions as to how they manage to avoid such crossings over.

Thanks for all the comments, stars and hearts for the dolphin murmuration. The smaller flocks tonight were generally more like amoebae!