What may be most stunning to mere mortals is that these birds react so quickly and do so in such synchronization if not immediately, within a couple of flaps of a bird's wing. Some communication between birds may be happening, too, in murmurations - say, pointing out good food sources - while some researchers believe simply keeping warm may be another reason for the murmurations

Scientists believe these birds flock in the first place to confuse and discourage predators, through their sheer numbers, with the noise such a flock makes and, of course, its motion. 'Depending on how you change those three parameters,' Pesendorfer says, 'you can get everything from those barrel-looking baseballs that you get in ocean fish, to loose-looking insect swarms, to highly, highly organized fish swarms and murmurations.

Angular alignment: 'So you got to kind of follow his direction.'.

A repulsion zone: 'Which means, you don't fly into his lane, otherwise you both fall.'.

An attraction zone: 'Which means, in this area, you're going to move toward the next guy.'.

The scientists' findings were published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology in January 2013. And from that, a whole murmuration moves. Considering all these little groups of seven touch on other individuals and groups of seven, twists and turns quickly spread. Turns out the magic number is seven: Each bird keeps tabs on its seven closest neighbors and ignores all else. From that, they built a mathematical model that identified the optimal number of flock-mates for each bird to track. The Italian physicists used more than 400 photos from several videos to find out, plotting the position and speed of birds as they flocked. 'In a flock with 1,200 birds, it is clear that not every bird will be able to keep track of the other 1,199 birds,' Naomi Leonard, the Princeton engineer, said back then, 'so an important question is 'Who is keeping track of whom?'' In 2013, a mechanical and aerospace engineer and her team from Princeton collaborated with physicists in Italy to study murmurations. In order to understand this behavior, we have to go from the local scale - what is the individual doing, what are the rules that the individual is following? - to the global scale what is the outcome?' 'But these murmurations are actually self-organized, meaning that it's the individual's little behavioral rules that make it scale up to the large group. Think of a rock show, you have the rock star in the front and he starts clapping his hands, and the whole stadium starts clapping,' Pesendorfer says. You can have the top-down control, where you have some kind of leadership, or some kind of top-down mechanism. 'There's two ways that you can elicit large group behavior. It's ' the rapid transmission of local behavioral response to neighbors' that enables such startling synchronicity, as the authors of a 2015 paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences wrote. In the 1950s, scientists studying insects and fish and other collective animal behavior posited that group movement is more of a stunningly fast response to others in the flock (or the school, or the swarm) rather than some innate mind-reading ability or a command from the group leader. a flash out of so many brains,' he wrote in his book, ' Thought-Transference (or What?) in Birds.'ДЄs the years wore on, we found out that's not quite it.

'They must think collectively, all at the same time. In the 1930s, famed ornithologist Edmund Selous suggested that birds moving in murmurations were using some sort of telepathy to transmit their flying intentions.

Starling flocks