While some of us might enjoy the comfort of cozying up under a pile blankets with the cool autumn air on our cheeks, this luxury isn’t for the birds. The sheer size and hypnotizing motion of these mass aerial stunts is sure to make targeting a single bird more difficult. Imagine being a predator, like a Peregrine Falcon, looking for a meal. While the exact reason for this flying performance is not fully understood, it’s believed to be a combination of a few explanations: These exceptional aerial shows are called murmurations. The sounds of flocks can be heard echoing through the evening sky, but it’s the sight of them flying overhead that is sure to amaze you! In some places, these autumn roosts have been known to have up to 100,000 starlings. With all the coloured leaves and migrating birds, autumn is all about big performances.īut even before sharing these spectacular displays, autumn delights us with the sights and sounds of another performance: the fabulous fall show presented by European Starlings.Īs temperatures get cooler, we begin to see congregations of starlings forming in the treetops, fields, and even on power lines across Ontario. The mathematical model could also be useful in developing new methods for tracking space debris.Today’s blog comes from Jessica Stillman, school outreach coordinator for Bronte Creek Provincial Park. The team believes that their study, published in Nature Communications, could influence engineers and tech developers in developing swarms of drones that could say, fly collectively over fields to tend crops. To test the model, they used it in computer simulations of an artificial murmuration. The team of physicists used video footage of starling flocks ranging from 10 birds to 3,000 to develop their mathematical model. “And each bird is able to change its velocity a little bit in a very easy way.” Antonio Culla of Università Sapienza in Rome. “There is no leader in a flock everyone imitates its neighbors,” said Dr. What they found was only a small difference in speed between each adjacent bird, and that each starling is in fact simply copying the bird next to it, but with incredible speed. Italian researchers and physicists from the Università Sapienza in Rome took a closer look at footage of starling murmurations and developed a mathematical model for what’s going on in these aerial feats. Scientists and naturalists have long wondered about this. Starlings are often singled out and hunted by predators like falcons, so this aerial formation is thought to be a natural defensive instinct. It is also a natural wonder of the world where up to 3,000 starlings fly in a giant whirling mass in near-perfect unison. Starling murmurationĪ murmuration is the collective noun of a flock of starlings. Have you ever watched a flock of birds fly, turn, and dive in what seems like perfect unison? You might look at this and assume that a lead bird is determining the directions of the flock, or that they are collectively responding to small changes in the wind.Īll of those are good guesses, but physicists from the Università Sapienza in Rome have used computer simulations to determine what they believe is the real reason for this amazing coordination.
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