Starlings are experts at sticking together

by Philip Bell                                                                                                                                                      Vol. XXIV, No. 9, October 2011

Watching a large flock of birds banking, rolling, turning, twisting, and continually morphing into different shapes in flight can be a mesmerizing experience; a similar phenomenon occurs in very large herds of mammals and in schools of fish. It is why such displays are rated by nature lovers the world over to be among the greatest of wildlife spectacles.

Due to their sheer numbers, starlings form some of the more impressive aerial displays among birds. But how do they fly in such an impressively cohesive group? A combined effort by a dozen European researchers (including biologists, physicists, and statisticians) examined starlings in the skies above Rome to discover how they could stick together in flocks and move in unison, almost like a super-organism.

It has long been presumed that each starling simply keeps a set distance from its near neighbours. But it turns out that this assumption is quite wrong.

The researchers on the Starling Project (as it was called) analyzed the three-dimensional positions of several thousand individual birds on the wing. To their surprise, they found that each starling seems to be continuously monitoring the positions of an average of six or seven of its neighbours, regardless of how far away they are. In other words, starlings have a pre-programmed, numeric, object-tracking ability. In their published paper, the authors explain how this tracking method enables the flock to resist the attempts of predators to pick off stragglers:

“By interacting within a fixed number of individuals the aggregation can be either dense or sparse, change shape, fluctuate and even split, yet maintain the same degree of cohesion.”

The scientists concluded that starlings have brilliant bird brains and are much cleverer than they had given them credit for.

So here we have yet another remarkable insight into the way animals work and behave—evidence for a wonderful Creator who conceived, planned, programmed and made them. They’re certainly not the consequence of ‘Father Time’, ‘Mother Nature,’ or ‘Lady Luck’!