This might look like an egregiously misplaced school of fish, but it's actually an example of what ornithologists (bird experts) call a murmuration:It's a flock of hundreds to thousands of tiny song birds called starlings. But exactly how the birds within these swarms decide to move and when is a complete mystery.
Within a murmuration, starlings are constantly on the move, so the shape is always changing.
But some photographers managed to capture some incredible, split-second moments of these flowing flocks that look strikingly similar to common shapes like a gigantic smoking pipe, goose, and sting ray. Check them out below:
Starlings are indigenous to Europe, Asia, and Africa, but have since been introduced to North America and northern Australia. So, if you live where these birds are prevalent, then you might catch this crazy phenomenon, like the sting-ray shaped murmuration shown below:
Source: Murmuration of Starlings
There are nearly 120 species of starlings, and they don't seem to mind mixing it up. In fact, starlings are famous for their gregarious nature. You can find multiple different species within the same murmuration.
During non-breeding seasons, starlings will roost together in groups of hundreds to thousands. It's usually during this same time that you'll see giant murmurations like this goose-shaped one:
There's no obvious rhyme or reason to what direction the flock will turn and when. Sometimes certain sections will break off forming separate groups, like this one:
and this one, too:
Other times, you'll see a densely packed group amidst the rest of the flock, like the darker clump toward the right of this murmuration:
To some degree, physicists have managed to describe the random motion of murmurations with the same equations that they use to interpret phase transitions, like when a liquid turns to a gas.
Source: Wired
But that doesn't explain the greatest mystery about these gigantic swarms.
Source: Wired
It seems like starlings at one end of the flock know exactly direction starlings on the other end — hundreds of birds apart — are going to move and when. And scientists can't figure out how this is possible.
Regardless of how or why, starling murmurations are without-a-doubt one of the most peculiar natural phenomena in the sky.
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