LEARNING FROM BIRDS DURING A WORLDWIDE PANDEMIC
A large flock of starlings swooping off the coast of Brighton, England/ Mike Hewitt/Getty Images
If you’ve ever seen a group of starlings move collectively in flight in flocks that can number in the hundreds of thousands, swirling and pulsating in a harmonized whole, seemingly defying the laws of nature, then you’ve seen a flocking behavior called a murmuration. It is a breathtaking, mesmerizing sight to see such a rapid & constantly changing visual patterning that happens when so many individuals are doing the same thing.
But scientists say murmurations do more than mesmerize us. Understanding how birds, insects, fish and other collective animal behavior works can give us insights into how “the rapid transmission of local behavioral response to one’s neighbors” enables such startling synchronicity & how it might benefit us.
So, how do they do it? How does a flock of say 1,200 birds keep track of the other 1,199 birds? It starts by understanding that murmurations are actually self-organized systems, meaning that it’s the individual’s small behavioral rules that make it scale up to the large group. We have to go from the small, local scale, asking what is the individual doing and what are the rules they’re following, before going to the global scale, asking what is the outcome for the whole system or group?
Could learning how each bird knows how to stay in their own lane, so to speak, benefit us in this worldwide pandemic that warns us to stay at least 6ft away from each other so as not to spread the highly contagious Covid-19 virus? Italian physicists, using photos from numerous videos, plotted the position & speed of birds as they flocked and built a mathematical model that identified the optimal number of flock-mates that each bird would have to track in order to synchronize their flight with one another.
As it turns out, the magic number is seven. Each bird must keep tabs on its seven closest neighbors & ignore everyone else. And because birds process information around them much more quickly than humans, this awareness of their seven neighbors enables them to react in amazing synchronization, within a couple flaps of their wings to move in perfect timing with one another.
So, what could we learn from the murmurations of starlings? What if we took responsibility for seven of our neighbors, just seven? And what if those seven took responsibility for seven more, bringing our number to 49. Then, what if those 49 each take responsibility for 7, giving us 343 that in turn concern themselves with how seven of their neighbors are doing, giving us 2,401! And so on and we’ve taken care of literally hundreds of millions of human beings by concerning ourselves with just seven of our neighbors, thus creating a “human murmuration!”
The crises of the Covid-19 virus is allowing and teaching us how to move forward together as a whole, like the murmuration of the thousands of starlings taking flight as one. We must act as one unit, as one whole body, moving in harmony & synchronization with one another so that we all might live. And we can make this leap or flight into a greater awareness by keeping track of seven of our nearby neighbors. Everything in our lives has led us to this one moment, this global event, and We Are Ready.
Who are your 7 closest neighbors you will keep track of?