Reader Susan Schwartz sent this fabulous video to me.
Filmed by wildlife photographer Dylan Winter, it shows the “murmurations” of starlings.
“At dusk on a winter evening in southern England a flock of 200,000 European starlings congregate to soar in breathtaking formations before roosting for the night. These incredible displays of aerial precision and biological engineering are captured in this memorable sequence from FLIGHT: THE GENIUS OF BIRDS.”
Watch and enjoy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Well that is one take regarding this invasive species. If only they actually could make music! Actually sounds like one of the plagues of Egypt! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYm1fpTqsZY
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Fantastic. Just watched it with my young son, who’s a bird guy.
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sublime!
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You care about the total person. As many of us care about YOU
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Thank you, Susan and Diane!!!
In the nineteenth century, an estimated 3 billion passenger pigeons would travel south each year across the United States. They were so numerous that they blackened the sky overhead for three days. Hunters would fire random shotgun blasts into their flocks, and they would drop to the ground by the hundreds. I have seen photos of hunters standing next to mountains of dead passenger pigeons, dwarfed by those mountains of bodies.
In 1914, the last passenger pigeon, named Martha by her captors (after Martha Washington), died in the Cincinnati Zoo.
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Wonderful! Here is another video (14:27 minutes) on the begining of a human. http://bit.ly/TheHumanBegins
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This is sad! We have been exterminating other biological species and our own smaller tribal cultures, with their languages and cultures, for a long while now, with increasing devastation and death. Even as we hail and worship “progress”, we ignore all of this. Three continents (the Americas, especially North America, and Australia) have been cleared of their earlier human inhabitants over just a few centuries, while millions of species are being driven to extinction.
It seems that traditional teachers are also slated for extinction, along with the public schools, in this and other countries. We too appear to be headed where the passenger pigeons went. It is the same reckless, blind hubris and greed, repeating its dark karma over and over again.
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Susan always has a beautiful eye, and I have been privy to her nature photographs, as they are stunning, majestic, and at the same time, exquisitely delicate and sensitive.
I would like to pose to the audience that this video is also a metaphor for the power of collectivist thinking and action and how we can continue to use exactly those elements to right all the wrongs that have occurred in public education over the last 50 years.
Together, we the starlings can overcome any predator raptor who dares to interfere with populist sentiment and the needs of the masses, all out of its own avarice.
I would love to have seen these birds in real life . . . .
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Thanks for this to the starlings, Dylan Winter, Susan Schwartz and Diane Ravitch!
I wrote something briefly about the murmuration (and the schools) below.
http://thedailypoet.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-murmuration.html
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I wish that we, as humans, could learn their determination to fly miles and miles together while communicating in a manner that we know not.
And doing so in a manner that paints beauty across the land and sky. Thanks for sharing.
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Loved the patterns illuminated in the sky by the birds. Very beautiful
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“Bird Counts”
Murmur of earth
Concerto of birds
Value and worth
Uncounted by nerds
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Excellent!
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200,000……I seem to remember such a number spoken here many times…..
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This was an exquisite filmed sequence! I went to the source’s YouTube page in search of similar ceature features. I did find some that I may view in the future. I also noticed that even more videos on that page were there in support of Creationism.
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creature, not ceature
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What a wonderful metaphor for the work being done by the citizens in Jefferson County Public Schools in Colorado who are working together to defeat the hawks (aka the school board majority– Ken Witt, John Newkirk, and Julie Williams). This summer the citizens initiated a recall of each one of the board members. Needing 15,000 signatures per member, the citizens collected more than double in a mere 17 days of the 60 that were given. The recall is now going to be on the November ballot! Here is to the STARlings of Jeffco Public Schools. May they show the hawks (aka Koch brothers who funded our school board election 2 years ago) that they have no place in their roost!!!! If you want to follow what is happening in the biggest school district in Colorado sign up for Jefferson County School Board Watch, Support Jeffco Kids, or Jeffco United for Action.
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