Garden

[gardenman]

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@NickNack wrote:

Wow!  Truly amazing!  I would love to see something like that.

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It is amazing. I question that it's done to avoid predators however since they only come together like that towards evening. Predators are active day and night, not just in the evening. Thick gatherings of birds like that advertise their presence to predators more than discourage predation. I suspect it has more to do with some sort of social activity/communication of some sort. We know bees and ants communicate the location of food through dance and movement. If I was guessing, and I am since I'm not a starling, I would guess this was something similar. A starling that's found a good food source, water source, an area heavy with predators or predator free leads the dance in the sky to tell the others what he/she found and they follow to learn the path to take or avoid.

Most animals that school or herd together stay in schools or herds all the time. Not starlings. They only come together like that in the evening. We know bees and ants communicate with one another in complex ways. Even trees communicate with one another. Why not starlings? A bird who finds a field rich in grain can't eat it all themself. But, if they can inform their fellow birds of the field it benefits them all. If multiple birds find multiple resources and report it to the flock each night, then the whole flock benefits. I strongly suspect the murmurations are an aerial roadmap to what certain starlings have found that day while out exploring. Their movements, seemingly random to us, are showing their fellow birds where the good, or bad, stuff lies.