There are a lot of phenomena I hope to see before I die: bioluminescent waves, the aurora borealis, mammatus + nacreous clouds, salt flats, desert roses, goats in trees. But right now all I want to see are starlings colliding in massive, musical forms called murmurations. These murmurations can range from small groups of a few hundred starlings in a small ball to undulating seas of millions of birds that might block out the sun.
Look at them. So magically charged. It’s one of the rare times an English signifier matches the event it signifies. A murmuration is full of motion. It billows and whirls.
Images of the birds remind me of the motion in this painting. “Leaves” by Australian Aboriginal artist Gloria Tamerre Petyarre. I image this to be what it looks like from the center of the murmuration, where the murmur starts.
According to the Seattle Art Museum website,
The painting recalls a place where Petyarre sat for hours under particular trees with women as they prepared seeds for small cakes and taught one other about the medicinal properties of plants in their home named Utopia.”
Millions of starlings move like scattered seeds in wind.
In this vid you can see how the starlings really dance. I like to mute the Youtube music and put on something a little more exploratory and mysterious like Harold Budd or this song. Maybe smoke some weed. That’s just me.
The starlings trade places with the wind when they murmur. The shapes they find are slippery and bulbous like organs.
The murmuration is one infinitely shifting organism that morphs like energy in and out of the body. It’s more than a collection of starlings the same way a wave is more than a collection of water droplets. One starling can be distinguished from the mess only the way a particular element can be distinguished in a song, you catch it for a moment before it’s absorbed back into the mass, where it lives.
Even when murmurations number many thousands of birds, they manage to fly in a collective mathematical synchrony that still baffles researchers today.
I laughed at first when I read this on birdfact.com. Is there anything better than magic with no explanation? Much of the time I find scientific justification of natural phenomena to have a squashing effect… but there are instances where the connective tissue is thick enough to deepen my understanding of the process. Birdfact.com continues,
The most compelling evidence suggests that each starling in the flock communicates with just a handful of other starlings, probably just 6 or 7, and follows their cues and copies their movements in a process known as ‘scale-free correlation’. When one bird moves, its nearest neighbors do, and so on and so forth, which propagates a wave-like movement which pulses through the entire flock.
This is similar to how particles move in, say, an avalanche. The movement of each individual particle is intrinsically linked to the movement of another nearby particle.
Consider the starlings moving at speeds up to 90 mph, improvising shapes, deconstructing and reconstructing their corpus. As they fly their wings beat thickly, forming a subtle layer of sound: the murmuration. The avalanche.
I want to make a series of poems : my murmurations, that will flow out of the endless well : the echologue
Stay tuned for these + thanks for reading. More posts coming soon…. Comment through Substack or email me with anything you’d like to see or anything you want to say <3
PS. If you get deep into starling research, or if you already know a thing or two about birds, you might find them referred to as “bullies”, stuff like “these birds suck” “make bad noise and poop all the time”
Rather than boarding the starlings suck train, I’m finding goodness in the idea that a mean and stinky bird can make such beautiful shapes with its family.
xoxo
earthworm
i ♥️ starlings ….. we don’t have them on vashon so i never saw them growing up until i started visiting seattle more often and was like “what bird is that” ?!?!? they have this like fluorescence to their feathers that i always thought was so beautiful. i would get so confused when people would be hating so hard. if U desire it i think a murmuration will come to you, and let’s swim in the bioluminescence at KVI this summer <3
I absolutely love that it's referred to as murmurations, because these spectacular creatures are being defined here by what they are doing! In collective! it is a shift, it is the motion, not the stillness of the defining of a creature. thanks for this, I didn't know they created such beautiful forms, especially in a still frame of the process. I used to watch and stare as crows would swarm the transit center I went to everymorning, until they all seemed to fall into a beautiful rhythm of landing on a roof. This occurred at sunrise in the winter.