THE DAILY GRIST: “If nature has ever produced a more perfect thing than the mesmerizing beauty of this starling swarm, I have yet to encounter it. No other phenomenon has ever stopped me in my tracks quite like this, made me forget everything else in the world except the brief moment of grace unfolding before me”… Christie Aschwanden
I spend a lot of time outdoors because I ride my bike a lot. At certain times of year I witness a phenomenon in the sky which is spellbinding. It is an incredible visual spectacle called a murmuration, thousands of small birds (starlings) flying in constantly changing cloud-like flock formations. The photo you just saw was chosen because the formation of birds actually happens to look like a giant bird.
Take a look at this video and you will see how the fluidity of these formations of individual birds makes an even more impressive display:
When you see something so fantastic as this in nature it makes you wonder. How can social organisms possibly coordinate their movements with each other so precisely? I learned a lot about this from an article from a Cornell student, Andrea Alfano (allaboutbirds.org, if you’re interested). But let me summarize for those of you like me with short attention spans and who need some bluegrass relevance to keep them interested.
When you listen to a really good bluegrass band, I’ll bet it can make your jaw drop in wonder just like mine does when I see a bird murmuration. How can a wink and a nod get all of those pickers into such a great coordinated groove? Well one reason might be that the group size is manageable.
Allow me to cite the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences where Andrea Cavagna and colleagues used advanced computational modeling and video analysis to study this question. They found that starling flocks model a complex physical phenomenon, seldom observed in physical and biological systems, known as scale-free correlation.
Surprising as it may be, flocks of birds (like good bluegrass bands) are never led by a single individual. Even in the case of flocks of geese, which appear to have a leader, the movement of the flock is actually governed collectively by all of the flock members. But the remarkable thing about starling flocks is their fluidity of motion. As the researchers put it, the group responds as one and cannot be divided into independent subparts.
“When one starling changes direction or speed, each of the other birds in the flock responds to the change, and they do so nearly simultaneously regardless of the size of the flock. In essence, information moves across the flock very quickly and with nearly no degradation. The researchers describe it as a high signal-to-noise ratio.
This scale-free correlation allows starlings to greatly enhance what the researchers call effective perceptive range, which is another way of saying that a starling on one side of the flock can respond to what others are sensing all the way across the flock a huge benefit for a starling trying to avoid a falcon”.
Did you ever wonder why bluegrass bands stopped adding instruments after the addition of the Dobro and still never seem to be larger than six or seven? Well the murmuration phenomenon might give us a clue as to the answer.
A study on starling flocks appeared in the journal PLOS Computational Biology. The researchers, led by George Young at Princeton, did their own analysis of murmuration images to see how the birds adjust to their flockmates. They determined that starlings in large flocks consistently coordinate their movements with their seven nearest neighbors. They also found that the shape of the flock, rather than the size, has the largest effect on this number; seven seems optimal for the tightly connected flocks that starlings are known for.
The dynamics of a great bluegrass band or a great bluegrass jam are special. Musicians at their best can sense the lateral lines of the other fish in the mix and adjust their efforts appropriately to make the best sound. I never like to join a jam that has more than a certain number of people and there’s a reason for that. Jams need to be split up occasionally in order to infuse the spontaneity that bluegrass music requires. Six or seven is probably a pretty good maximum number. If you’re in a symphony orchestra where the music is scripted for that particular brand of beautiful sound OK. But bluegrass is made for different vibes.
