Mind Blown

Starlings fly around in swooping, intricately coordinated patterns.

Despite there being 310 million starlings in the world few people have heard of them, let alone seen them perform their mass aerial stunt known as 'murmuration'. If you had, your jaw would have dropped.

This phenomenon takes place at dusk when the tiny birds form a huge, noisy, swooping flock and then proceed to trace a series of intricately coordinated patterns in the sky.

Murmuration could be mistaken for some kind of avian performance art but, in reality, it has more to do with basic survival than it does with dramatics. By teaming up in such massive, fast-moving groups, the starlings enjoy safety benefits.

Unsurprisingly, predators find it almost impossible to target one starling in the middle of a hypnotising flock.

Incredibly, starlings in a group are aware that those on the outside and those who land first are the most vulnerable to attack. Their response is to create an internal competition to weed out the weakest of the flock.

While murmurations are often made up of thousands of starlings, there have been reports of flocks that number in the hundreds of thousands. That would be a truly mesmerising sight!