Completely Unreal and Eerie video of a HUGE flock of Starlings(Flash required)

I don't want to spoil it for you so just watch and then when a few people post I'll weigh in with my comments.

video.google.com...

Thats Sweet !!!
I love the way the bend that tree !!!

That is crazy. Never seen anything like that before. Looks a lil freaky too & reminded me of the Hitchcock movie Birds.

that was actually really freaky to watch lol looked like they were trying to attack the tree, circling it first then goin in for the kill

The behaviour of flocks of birds or schools of fish is something I find fascinating.

Sudden wheelings, changes of direction, can seem to happen simultaneously: plus the individuals of a flock or shoal never seem to collide.

Personally, I think it has to do with a property of consciousness which manifests in groups of individuals all of which are doing the same thing. There's a book called The Field - I forget the author's name - which details some of the more interesting cutting-edge hypotheses and research into the nature of consciousness. One of the areas of research is the disruption of electronic random number generation by groups of people. There is a project - noosphere.princeton.edu... - that monitors the output of RNGs to detect moments of coherence.

It is of interest that the events of 9/11 - which were watched live by many people around the world - caused unprecedented spikes of coherence in the purportedly random data.

In The Field, the author relates other RNG experiments in which portable devices were taken to various events. Apparently, the performances of Wagner's Ring Cycle at Bayreuth provoked highly coherent output at the operas' most emotionally intense pieces - when people were listening the hardest.

I am a musician, and one of my bands is an improvising ensemble, and occasionally, the band will suddenly change direction all at once just like a flock of birds or a school of fish. It's a very odd feeling but they are moments to be treasured, and again, we find that the coherence we achieve comes through intense listening. Listening, in fact, is the most important thing we can do in improvising - far more important than playing, or having one's individual voice heard.

As for the starlings... I think they were doing what they were doing because it was fun - but that's possibly more revelatory of my attitude to life than anything else.

Or maybe not. "Scientists" or "skeptics" (people like B F Skinner, who thought it was more scientific to treat living organisms like machines) tend to deny the validity of consciousness in other life forms - and even, in extreme circumstances, in other human beings. I find this kind of thinking appalling.

A few ago years there were lots of flocks like this (and bigger) in the countryside near where I live. They never exibited the strange behavior of all trying to get into the same tree though. What puzzles me is some years I see no large flocks of birds yet on others there are massive flocks that are seen regularly. What would be very interesting is if a flock could be observed from formation to it's end.

Or maybe not. "Scientists" or "skeptics" (people like B F Skinner, who thought it was more scientific to treat living organisms like machines) tend to deny the validity of consciousness in other life forms - and even, in extreme circumstances, in other human beings. I find this kind of thinking appalling.

Huh?

What Century are you living in?

Most Philosophers and Scientists(And Scientist Philosophers) that I've talked to about the Nature of conciousness are convinced that most "higher" animals are self-aware, it's just that we have no concrete evidence of that fact. Actually we do, of a sort, they've found that when they gave a Dolphin access to a mirror, and then put a mark on the dophin on a place that was unaccessable most of the time, they found that the critter learned of the function of the mirror and posed in different positions to get a look at this mark, they then removed it and put it back in, it went to look for the mark and was a 'lil confused that it was gone but it knew that it was on it's body, that is pretty good evidence of a thinking, critical, self aware individual.

We can't ask them obviously, so we need to look more into behavioral and neural traits. In the 19th and Early to mid 20th centuries, scientists did infact believe that they were no more then automatons.

This was when Darwins theories were still controversial in Acedemia(they are not now, regardless of how Creationists and IDers frame the whole versus argument), so logically, anyone who would scoff at the idea that we came from a "lower" form of animal, would also likely scoff at the idea that Animals are thinking and feeling beings.

I personally think another reason why some scientists today cling to that old notion of "Robotic" animals, do so, because the nature of their work has them experimenting on animals daily and they do it to emotinally distance themselves from their work.

Just a theory.

I have seen many times sparrows and the like playing games with each other in groups. I wouldn't be surprised if this was some sort of game to the starlings. That was cool watching them drag the trees down then watching them spring back up.


pie

I remeber writing a simple program to mimic flocks in my class. It was much easier to give each object in the flock a simple set of instructions, rather then trying to program instructions for the enitire flock as a whole. This way when you add new objects to the flock, they will behave correctly. My point is, a large group of objects, fish...birds...feathers floating all follow very simple rules as INDIVIDUALS. With out the individuality of the objects, there would be chaos.

Flocks of starlings, and crow, are common in the eastern U.S. One can watch them begin to form smaller bands in late fall, then those bands unite to form large flocks. I've watched streams of starlings flying that stretched for a mile or more. I've seen crows roost in in the woods so densely that limbs a foot thick snapped from the weight, and droppings would be 3 inches thick on the ground, firing a gun would cause them to rise up in unison, sounding like thunder.

It appears in the video a juniper is what they are after, called a red cedar in the east here, and these trees have small blue berries which are a source of winter food.

www.scienceviews.com...

Originally posted by smokenmirrors
...It appears in the video a juniper is what they are after, called a red cedar in the east here, and these trees have small blue berries which are a source of winter food...

I think the juniper tree gives the video an interesting angle...flock behaviour to obtain food for all the members. The tree branches may be too dense for single birds to get at berries, so the flock uses its combined weight and momentum to land en-masse to drag the tree down and get access to those berries cant reach.

What I find facinating is how the flock communicates this kind of behaviour between single members

I tend to agree with smokeandmirrors here. I, too, live in the northeast US and his accounts are spot on. Some years they seem more plentiful than others, but the "swarming" they do in the video is not out of character at all. There have been days where very large portions of our yard are literally black with Starlings. One good Loud noise gets 'em airborne, after that it's like watching a swarm of mackerel, with the flock seeming to take on it's own life, borne of the individual birds within. Interesting to watch, though.


$ .02

FYI, The reason why I posted the video is their effect on the tree's, and it reminded me of that Hitchcock movie sooo much . I've seen flocks of seagulls and pigeons larger then that by the lake in RL.

Sardion, I live in Mississauga and my daughter and I used to watch these birds from our balcony over the wooded area behind our building. They usually came out at dusk and would do exactly the same thing as in your video link.

Sometimes we would go outside and not even know they were in the trees, and then all of a sudden they would fly all at once. The first time we saw this was spectacular as there is almost an eerie silence in the woods when they are in the trees.

If you find somewhere in Toronto to view this do it, the video is cool but actually seeing them and hearing them fly all at once is pretty amazing.

www.hawkeye.ca...

As the link states, they can sometimes overwhelm structural buildings with their combined weight, sometimes we would see them line along the buildings rooftops surrounding our area. There are alot of buildings in the city centre of Mississauga so when the starlings did this almost every edge of the rooftops were covered in black. The weird thing is they don't make any sound while they are there so most people don't even notice they are there until they fly.

What have they got against that tree????

That is truly an amazing footage! Flocks really are interesting...

That is an interesting video, and I too sometimes see flocks of birds in my area. They come around when migrating and will stop in an area to rest. You know they are around because when they are in the trees they make a lot of noise all chirping at once. They can get pretty loud, then *poof* they are gone in a few seconds.

Imagine if they flew over a guy with a brand new Ferrari or Lambo and he's proud of it and the birds fly over and carpet bomb crapped the car, that is a funny thought