The two minute video below, produced by Sophie Windsor Clive and Liberty Smith, a pair of young videographers from London, is making the rounds on the Internet nearly as fast as the starlings in the video change direction. The video was shot along Ireland’s River Shannon and the phenomenon portrayed in the video is called a murmuration (add it to your spell checker!). As you’ll see, the twisting, undulating mass of birds is a jaw dropping experience—as demonstrated by the reaction of the women at the end of the video. We originally learned of this video via our RSS feed for Wired Magazine’s Science section [click here for the article—an interesting read].
The phase transitions demonstrated within starling murmurations are not unprecedented in the natural world, as demonstrated below in the video of a sardine “bait ball” being worked by long-beaked common dolphins and sharks.
For more information on the murmuration video, visit http://www.islandsandrivers.co.uk