Thursday, November 7, 2013
"Starling Murmurations Captured by Photographer Alain Delorme"
"Just by their natural habits, some animals make art. From the famous webs of spiders, to the amazing arrangements of the sand bubbler crab, many animals leave us with beautiful patterns in the wake of their everyday life. If spiders and crabs leave us sculptural works of art, then the starling is a performance artist. These small european birds flock together, forming moving clouds of flapping wings that shimmer with life in motion. These flocks are called a murmuration."
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15 comments:
"You Ruined My Whole Day"
Great photograph.
Nifty stuff but the writing's kind of gay.
It would be interesting to write a computer program to incrementally add rules pertaining to individual behavior in a flock (direction, spacing), to see if the sum of the simulated motions would eventually mimic those patterns. My thinking is that it could be done with no more than 2 or 3 instructions per bird, unless chaos ensued.
I mean, I'd like to be able to write such a program.
If I was a NYC city employee, de Blasio's talk of turning NYC's Left, I would hear, let the good times roll.
More pay for less work, a chance to cheat if I could get away with it.
What else does a departure from what Giuliani started does a heard turn to the left means?
I had no idea that is what the birds look like. They're beautiful.
After I ditched Boy Scouts at Barksdale because their troop sucked and it was at the activity center where other activities were a lot more interesting, dear ol' Dad signed us both up for Civil Air Patrol and it was right straight back to uniforms and regimentation and discipline and shiny shoes, and marching and empty ritual and ensigns and power plays all over the place all over again and there we were all lined up in a row for inspection or just regular gathering in an organized row before entering the hangar for technical instruction about weather and caution and care and technical mechanics and caution and care, and flight planning and caution and care, and all other kind of wearisome Left-brain numerical shit I had no perceived use for and the whole time I was staring at birds disappearing into smoke stacks some few miles off, it appeared. Thousand of black dots in the distance a swarm making passes at the chimney at dusk, three tall chimneys sticking right up above everything. It took while to notice the swarm making passes and getting smaller with each pass and that many more passes are needed for them to put themselves up. In the chimney, or in the building underneath them? I still have no idea. That is the main thing I took from the entire CAP experience.
This morning I got up and went out in the back yard to play a little guitar in my underwear and watch the sunrise. It was a very warm morning. As I was sitting there I was enveloped in a light snow of tiny floating seeds. They were coming from a cattail (Typha latifolia) plant in my pond that was in full seed dispersal mode. I cut it off and shook it in the wind dispersing all the seeds at once. There must be millions on a single stock. It completely filled the sky over my entire southview. I could see the texture of the wind pattern in it. I could discern how the wind was wrapping around trees and structures. I wish I had taken a photo or even better a video. It was excellent and entirely free.
I love when I get to see birds swarm like that, but usually it's while I'm driving.
Neat, bago.
Hey Eric, stop bullying the lefty freak!
Beautiful -- we have those flocks here -- usually in the fall, but I have never seen them make anything quite like those photos.
As for swarms -- Michael Crichton (what an amazing guy he was) used his sci-fi thriller Prey to explain swarming. I was impressed.
Flights of starlings have a way of flying which is theirs alone and seems as governed by uniform and regular tactics as a disciplined regiment would be, obeying a single leader's voice with precision. The starlings obey the voice of instinct, and their instinct leads them to bunch into the centre of the squad, while the speed of their flight bears them constantly beyond it; so that this multitude of birds thus united by a common tendency towards the same magnetic point, unceasingly coming and going, circulating and crisscrossing in all directions, forms a sort of highly agitated whirlpool whose whole mass, without following a fixed course seems to have a general wheeling movement round itself resulting from the particular circulatory motions appropriate to each of its parts, and whose centre, perpetually tending to expand but continually compressed, pushed back by the contrary stress of the surrounding lines bearing upon it, is constantly denser than any of these lines, which are themselves the denser the nearer they are to the centre. Despite this strange way of swirling, the starlings cleave through the ambient air at no less rare a speed and each second make precious, appreciable headway towards the end of their hardships and the goal of their pilgrimage.
- Lautreamont
I play it equally well with or without strings. Some say better without.
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