A starling murmuration
Today, February 8, I was driving to my favorite salon to get my hair trimmed. When I drive, particularly on this pleasant route, my mind hums along. I was thinking that it was a new moon day in Aquarius, a fellow air sign, and new moons always mean new opportunities. Suddenly, I found myself stuck in a weird, negative train of thought, and when that happens, I try to find something else to think about.
I glanced up at the sky and saw a flock of birds – hundreds of small birds, I’m not sure what kind – flying west. Then they suddenly changed directions. And it hit me as a synchro, a message that I should do an immediate 180 in my thinking. And that’s what I did.
When I got home, I did some research on this curious phenomenon. In 1984, zoologist Wayne Potts published an article in Nature on his research on how flocking birds move. And his work illustrated that birds in flocks don’t just follow a leader. Instead, they anticipate sudden changes in the flock’s direction.
Sounds like precognition, right?
Once a change in direction begins in the flock, Potts said, it “spreads through the flock in a wave.” Potts called it a manoeuvre wave and said that it begins slowly but can reach speeds three times faster than would be possible if birds were simply reacting to their immediate neighbors. Potts called this ability among flocking birds the chorus line hypothesis. That is, he said, birds are like dancers who see an approaching leg kick when it’s still down the line, and anticipate what to do.
“These propagation speeds appear to be achieved in much the same way as they are in a human chorus line: individuals observe the approaching manoeuvre wave and time their own execution to coincide with its arrival.”
So not only did I experience a startling synchro, I apparently was observing precognition in action as well!
I love birds. I’m going to post some bird stuff soon including a bird that let me film it dying of natural causes.
I wonder if the birds’ radars sensed the horrific weather patterns that abound right now and made the turn to avoid them. Right now in our location we have a ‘dry’ nor’easter coming from the east hitting the arctic blast cold front from the NW. It’s really cold, beautiful blue sky, bright sunshine, gale-force winds. Strange combination. I know birds and other animals certainly sense planetary events before they manifest, and behave accordingly.
Weather here is just chilly, not much wind.
i watch the sky. a lot. and we have many many birds of many many varieties around. and i’ve seen this kind of thing over and over again and have always wondered how they do it. can you image us with our car, so close together, trying to do something like that??? and i’d kinda settled on believing it to be a ‘group consciousness’ that allows them to do this.
It’s amazing to see it happen!
The particular split second that your camera clicked onto the birds, it looks as though the
flock has formed a gigantic “question mark” in the sky. That was the immediate thought that popped into my mind when I first saw the photo. Your synchro, indeed….and I wonder about the question mark…..and looking at it even more closely, it almost appears to be a female form in a half-reclining position whose hair is flowing behind her. I admit I look at clouds often and see them forming all kinds of stuff, and think the shapes this flock of birds formed were pretty cool!
I didn’t take this picture. It’s off the internet! The flock turned so quickly that I couldn’t have even gotten to my phone before it happened.
I will never watch the birds flocking again without thinking of this. Fascinating! 🙂