I have European Starlings on my mind.\u00a0 I have been watching some of the large flocks (called murmurations) of starlings wheeling throught the air around dusk as they prepare to go to roost for the night.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure you have seen this behavior too.\u00a0 The flocks form in the fall after the breeding season and will persist until next spring.<\/p>\n
A flock in flight seems to have a collective mind of its own as the birds change direction often in unison.\u00a0 It is remarkable that birds don\u2019t fly into each other as they perform their aerobatic maneuvers.\u00a0 Thanks to the work of two Italian ornithologists, Dr. Michele Ballerini and Dr. Andrea Cavagna, we have a better understanding of the synchronized flight of these murmurations.<\/p>\n
Ballerini and Cavagna used a series of interlinked cameras to record murmurations in flight.\u00a0 A computer assimilated the data from the cameras to produce a three-dimensional map of all the birds in the flock.<\/p>\n
The researchers easily disproved the notion that there is a leader in the flock.\u00a0 Rather, birds seem to follow a couple of rules: fly in the same direction as your neighbors and keep your neighbors by your side rather than in front or behind.\u00a0 Like most birds with eyes set on the side of the head, starlings have a blind spot behind the head and directly in front as well.\u00a0 The best vision is off to the side.\u00a0 We know that starlings can change their direction in 100 milliseconds!<\/p>\n
The videotapes clearly showed that the spacing of the birds in the murmuration is not uniform.\u00a0 Birds in the middle of the flock are spaced closer together.\u00a0 Furthermore, birds change their position in the flock, sometimes on the outside and sometimes moving in.<\/p>\n
Flying together seems to confer protection from aerial predators like falcons or accipiters, much like small marine fish flock as protection against barracudas.\u00a0 The idea is that the many individuals are confusing to the predator.<\/p>\n
Woe unto the bird or fish that turns right when all the others turn left in the presence of a predator.\u00a0 It becomes easy pickings for the predator.\u00a0 So, the safest portion of a flying murmuration is in the middle.\u00a0 It\u2019s not surprising that there is a tendency of birds on the edge to flying toward the center.\u00a0 This movement has been termed selfish flock behavior<\/p>\n
These aerial ballets have only been performed in North America for the past 120 years or so.\u00a0 European Starlings are an introuduced species in the western hemisphere.\u00a0\u00a0 Their presence here is due to a man named Eugene Schieffelin. Schieffelin was a rather prosperous Englishman who moved to New York City around 1880.\u00a0 He thought it would be wonderful if Central Park had populations of all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare\u2019s plays.\u00a0 The first species he tried to introduce was the European Starling.\u00a0 He introduced around 100 birds in 1890 and 1891.\u00a0 His introduction was far more successful than he could ever have imagined.\u00a0 From those 100 birds, a population of more than 200 million birds now stretches across the continent.<\/p>\n
The introduction of starlings has had negative impacts on our native birds.\u00a0 A starlings all-purpose bill allows it to take a wide variety of food (seeds, fruit, invertebrates) .\u00a0 Starlings can compete for food with many types of birds.<\/p>\n
In addition,\u00a0 tarlings are cavity-nesters and their aggressive battles for nesting cavities has negatively affected native cavity-nesters.\u00a0 Eastern Bluebirds, Tree Swallows and woodpeckers are birds, which clearly have declined as starlings increased.\u00a0 Competition for cavities by starlings has affected other cavity-nesters as well like Tufted Titmice and nuthatches.\u00a0 Providing nestboxes with diameters too small for starlings to enter can ameliorate the problem.<\/p>\n
[Originally published on September 18, 2011]<\/p>\n\n
I have European Starlings on my mind.\u00a0 I have been watching some of the large flocks (called murmurations) of starlings wheeling throught the air around dusk as they prepare to go to roost for the night.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure you have seen this behavior too.\u00a0 The flocks form in the fall after the breeding season and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":146,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[420],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/146"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=432"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":433,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432\/revisions\/433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}