Holy Murmurations, Batman.

We spent the Labor Day weekend* on Cape Cod with Murr and Linda, friends we met at the New River Nature and Birding festival in May.
*Had we been in Canada, we would have enjoyed the Labour Day weekend instead.


I sorta knew Murr via the blogosphere, and so it was nice to meet her in person when we pulled up outside Smokey's on the Gorge our first night in West Virginia. "Is that who I think it is?" I asked Susan, another blogger who acted as den mother that weekend.

"Bill Thompson the Third?" she asked, as one of the, ahem, more distinguished of the festival luminaries walked past.

"No, Murr Brewster!!" Soon enough, we were trying to figure out what beer to drink. Just as I wondered if it would be too forward to offer Murr a sip of mine, she reached out and took it. From that point on it was like being with someone you've known all your life. And so here we were, a couple months later, ready to bag whatever birds and sample whatever IPAs the Cape could offer. All of this most capably and generously organized by Linda, who lives not too far away.

Birding is, of course, the common thread in our nascent friendship. There was a lot of good birding on Cape Cod. Wild turkeys flocked around our mid-century Truro cottage. In fact, Murr is wearing one of their feathers in the first photo.


It was shorebirds a go-go on Ballston Beach and Great Island. They really all do look alike.




Hurricane Earl canceled our scheduled Audubon trip to South Monomoy island when he knocked out the one available docking location, but we re-booked on a pontoon boat trip through the Nauset Marsh where we saw all kinds of goodies: great blue herons, great and snowy egrets...


four kinds of tern (common, roseate, forster's, and black) ...



(too) many cormorants...


eiders, various gulls, osprey, red-tailed hawks, and a variety of shorebirds (including redknots, black-bellied plovers, and a show-stopping flock of greater yellow-legs launching off and demonstrating just why they are so aptly named). We also saw some frolicking mammals:


On a solo trip to the Fort Hill area, Kelly and I saw tons more herons...


what we thought was a rough-legged hawk but was probably a harrier (still a life bird, still cool), a Cooper's Hawk that swooped down 20 feet in front of us, what we are pretty sure was an eastern kingbird, and this beautiful catbird. No mistaking that.



The most amazing sight, though, happened the first night on the Cape, and most of us missed it. Linda went for a sunset beach walk while the rest if us, gently fried from the afternoon sun and sand, hung out around the homestead with a cold beer. When Linda returned, she was initially speechless (though you could tell she had big news) and then burst out that she had witnessed possibly the wildest natural phenomenon of her lifetime. (I don't know Linda that well, but I guessed that was quite something.)

So the next two nights, we returned to the beach to see for ourselves. The first night, we saw this:


A murmuration of starlings. Linda was right; it was spectacular. This was a smaller flock than she had witnessed alone (which she estimated to be about 200,000). But what a way to appreciate an invasive species. In the UK, where starlings are indigenous, these gatherings are a sure sign of winter's approach, and though common, always seem to garner media attention. Which is helpful to your average blogger who sometimes gets ahead of herself in matters aviary.

In the fall of 2008, a spectacular murmuration over Gretna Green in Scotland caused The Independent to murmur: "A starling flock like this is called a murmuration, a word that perfectly describes the rustle of thousands of pairs of wings. Starling murmurations are one of the most dazzling displays in the natural world, as the flock changes shape, one minute like a colossal wisp of smoke, the next a tornado, the next a thundercloud blocking the light."

But why? Hot on the investigative trail, The Times reported some six months later that "Impenetrable as the flock’s movements might seem to the human eye, the underlying maths is comparatively straightforward. Each bird strives to fly as close to its neighbours as possible, instantly copying any changes in speed or direction. As a result, tiny deviations by one bird are magnified and distorted by those surrounding it, creating rippling, swirling patterns. In other words, this is a classic case of mathematical chaos (larger shapes composed of infinitely varied smaller patterns)."

The second night we came armed with video. Again, we saw fewer starlings than the night before. But the pattern was the same: a few birds here and there on the horizon, then larger and larger groups coming in from all directions but the seaward. Pardon the noise of wind and camera shutters in the following clip; I've left the audio track in so you can hear Murr's rather excited reaction. Unfortunately, the video definition on youtube isn't nearly as good as the original ... but you'll definitely get the idea by the end.


This little piece of mathematical chaos, as astounding as it seemed to us, is a common occurrence as the birds forage for food and then come home to roost, seeking warmth and safety in numbers. The Times reports that murmurations once occurred frequently in London, even stopping time. (The birds clogged up Big Ben in 1949.) Now starlings --or more precisely, their acidic poop-- are threatening the ancient sites of Rome.

Most amazingly, once we had seen the murmurations at Ballston Beach, we began to see the beginnings of them everywhere. Driving home through western Massachusetts and upstate New York over the next couple days, we saw more than a few graceful, mathematical swirlings of birds (one at eye level while crossing the Peace Bridge) on their way up, up, up to join their roostmates somewhere in the distance. It was something we had seen a million times before and never recognized.

Sort of like meeting an old friend you never knew you had.

*Incidentally, Murr had previously blogged on murmurations. You can read it here.