February 20, 2008

• And dancing with a Pict?
• It looks like that thing in Lost. I saw smaller flocks in Rome some years ago; they'd gather in the early evening and do their thing about 25 meters up. Quite mesmerizing to watch.
• Nice. I believe we get particularly large numbers of starlings in Britain because they migrate here from a number of other countries at this time of year. I've read that each starling monitors the progress of seven others in order to stay in synch, though I don't know how you could establish that. There was a paper on Cogprints recently about stigmergy (organisation through implicit signalling) which mentioned starlings, but I can't remember whether they were an example of it or an example of complex flock behaviour without it.
• They establish it by running computer models, IIRC. The proof that Starlings do so is that if they don't, they would crash into each other. Ergo, they have to be monitoring the other birds. Actually, I thought it was just the ones either side and the front, but there you go.
• Yes, it's the precise figure of seven that particularly puzzles me. Hhere's a brief reference, but I can't find anything on the organisation they mention ("Starlings in Flight").
• OK, I think this is the paper (pdf) (published in January - don't say we don't keep up to date around here...). They actually say six or seven.
• Clever Starlings. I have heard them mimic human voices before. Aussie Magpies will mimic many things too, one of our backyard visiting Magpies will do a car alarm before its usual carol.
• Holy cloud of wings! I've seen birds flock like this before, but never such a large group.
• I lived for a number of years in Wichita, Kansas, which is in the middle of the quite large American flyway. We'd see blackbirds do this at any time of the day, and it is a mesmerizing sight. More amazing, in terms of vast numbers were the crows. One evening I watched a band of crows crossing the sky from horizon to horizon, traveling in a straight line that was thousands of birds wide. I watched for 20 minutes, until I had to go inside and it never ended during my watch. I can't imagine how may birds would have been in that group.
• Lovely to watch them in flight. I just wish I could watch them all fly away. Damn, I hate starlings. They chase off every native bird here.
• grooving, Hank, not dancing.
• my god... it's full of starlings.