You may have already seen this video over at Boing Boing, but I thought it was worth posting anyway: a flock of what look like starlings doing some seriously creepy flocking. Check out the ribbon formation about ten seconds in. It literally gave me goosebumps!
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Hadn't seen it yet, thanks! Starlings are great mimics too, we used to have one at Amsterdam ZOO that did a great photocamera-shutter imitation. Imagine that whole flock making such a sound, or doing a ringtone..
I lived in Albany, GA for one year when I was 13. This sort of thing happened every year like clockwork, with rivers of these birds flowing through the skies.
And I thought starlings were creepy BEFORE I saw that.
We get these in Arkansas, usually starts in the beginning of fall, usually in the evenings.
My favorite was a ribbon of birds about 3 miles long that had a pseudo-wave-motion, like stadium humans doing the wave by flying higher or lower by 100 feet.
Starlings only creep me out when all 50 thousand land in the yard at once.
Wow - we had nothing like that back at home. It sounds like this is another aspect of the rest of the nation that I'll have to get used to, along with fireflies (cool!) and horseshoe crabs (freaky!)
If only we could capture amazing things on film (other than pavement neurons), then we'd surely have just as much traffic as Yahoo.