Flying starlings with a long shutter speed produce an abstract image by Anne Ponsen

About "Flying starlings with a long shutter speed produce an abstract image"

by Anne Ponsen

About the artwork

I photographed the starlings with a, for bird photography, long shutter speed. This created an abstract image that I converted to black and white.

Starlings have three reasons for flying together:
*At the end of the day, they gather to sleep and such a large cloud stands out and shows the way to conspecifics. Spending the night together is safer now, because more eyes have the enemy in view faster.
*For a sparrowhawk, it is harder to catch a starling from a confusingly moving swarm.
*This allows starlings to follow each other back to good feeding spots in the morning.

Swarming starlings don't clash, which is clever. It turns out that starlings all fly at the same speed (about 36 km/h), because braking or accelerating takes too much energy. That already makes it easier, because just collide with someone going at exactly the same speed. You can only do that if you turn the corner.
They keep an eye on up to seven neighbouring birds and make sure they don't fly into them. So if a few starlings change course, that movement spreads through the whole cloud, because they all adjust to those seven neighbours at lightning speed.

So those beautiful shapes in starling clouds may simply arise because the starlings want to fly together and make turns over a roost, they don't want to collide, they are all going at the same speed and seven neighbouring birds are keeping an eye on them. No telepathy or leadership is needed for that.