Going Parallel

Dusk: a familiar sight: hundreds of starlings perched high in the trees. Startled, they lift off in a ragged, dark mass, to become a flock, a single thing moving through time, wheeling, swooping, fanning, contracting and returning on itself, “Like a drunken fingerprint across the sky” (Richard Wilbur), to land again in the trees. How? Are they a chorus led by a conductor? Is each starling programmed to fly behind a leader in formation? Is the possibility of those arabesques an ancient piece of wisdom written, perhaps, into a starling’s DNA? Has evolution selected starlings that naturally flock? Apparently, none of the above. The effect–less complex in origin and perhaps more profound in implication than any of these–is the result of each starling following the simple rule of keeping the same distance from its neighbors.