The marvels of migrating birds

Migrating geese share the work of leading the flock and stay together through regular communication. As a result, they suffer the miserable fate of featuring in talks by motivational speakers. Teams, workforces or whole business clusters should be more like those geese, the boosters claim.

I once knew a boss who honed his goose speech to such perfection he even honked an air horn at key moments. Wildly popular on the local business circuit, he pursued his career as an unpaid speaker at the expense of his day job. He got fired, discovering in the process that he had been flying solo all along.

I sometimes think of this man when watching bird flocks. It is a good time of year for this, whether you are observing snow geese in the US or Asian cranes in Japan. As for me, I was tramping through the fields near a relative’s house in Northumberland when I startled 100 or so pink-footed geese. These bonny, dark-headed birds overwinter in their many thousands in the British Isles.

I felt bad at clumsily wasting so much of their hard-won energy. But the geese made a brave sight as they wheeled in the sky. In a minute or so, the foremost birds had formed a wide, V-shaped echelon, pointing their way northward up the coast.

Smaller groups of birds smoothly coalesced into V’s, flying in the wake of the main formation. The collective endeavour was inspiring. Needless to say, I did not harangue colleagues about it on Monday morning.

Migrating birds do not resemble human workers. They lack strong organisational hierarchies. Instead, they contribute like-for-like effort in quick succession. Flight leadership requires extra effort without extra reward. The benefits flow to birds flying slightly behind the leader on either side. Updrafts spilling over the leader’s wingtips reduce the energy expenditure of followers by 10 to 50 per cent.

In 2014, biologists investigated how migrating birds share the burden of flying first. Harnessed to a powered paraglider they led a flight of bald ibises from Austria to Italy. The ibises, many of which were related, formed pairs that took turns to fly in front and behind one another. Extrapolate that to a flock: one can imagine pairs cascading along each side of the V before briefly leading the formation.

I once knew a boss who honed his motivational goose speech to such perfection he even honked an air horn at key moments

Starlings also form tight units that flow together to spectacular effect. These great gyres of birds appear most often in the northern winter around twilight and are evocatively known as murmurations. They make it harder for predators to pick off single birds while advertising the chance to share body heat through chilly nights. The apparent synchronicity of each bird’s movement once prompted naturalists to imagine telepathy was involved.

Instead, starlings simply “have reaction times that make Olympic athletes look slow”, explains Professor Anne Goodenough of Gloucestershire University. Nor are they attempting to follow any master plan for their mega flocks. Each bird flies in formation with seven other birds. Assume every group shares constituents with others and you can see how a miracle of mass co-ordination becomes possible.

I have seen plenty of starlings but no murmurations this winter. Perhaps I have been spending too much time out of town. Starlings are comfortable around humans. Goodenough points to Southend and Aberystwyth piers as good places to see murmurations. There used to be a fine one at Leicester Square in central London, too. I had an extended opportunity to observe this one evening when I was younger and a date stood me up.

There is still a murmuration over the road bridge of Mérida, a city in western Spain littered with magnificent Roman architecture. Here, I have watched great plumes of starlings spiralling up into the darkening sky before swooping down to roost amid egrets and bee eaters on a tiny island in the river.

The Wadden Sea coast of south-west Denmark produces murmurations so vast locals call them “the black sun”. They resemble “clouds of magnetic dust or a superfluid”, says Søren Solkær. He made his name snapping the likes of Amy Winehouse and Metallica. Then the stark, liminal landscape of his native Jutland dragged him back. Now Solkær photographs flock stars as well as rock stars, capturing the “fascinating, beautiful” murmurations that he says have reconnected him to nature.

Obedient to Joni Mitchell’s dictum “you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone”, starlings are more appreciated in the UK now their population has collapsed. There is much to enjoy in the iridescent plumage, eclectic song and high-stepping gait of these avian eccentrics. They induce fury in many US birders. Britons, I suspect, would be happy to take back their invasive starlings if only Americans would reclaim their grey squirrels.

Flocking birds do have some life lessons for humans. But they are harder and darker than those imagined by motivational speakers. You can boil them down as follows. Make a few close alliances. Stick close to your comrades. Support one another with strict reciprocity. There is no percentage in pulling stragglers along in your slipstream. Let predators or the rigours of the journey claim them, lest those perils claim you.

Jonathan Guthrie is head of Lex

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