What the flock is that??

I was driving back from my parents' the other day and happened to see a flock of birds wheeling across the sky alongside Interstate 88. Not in any way unusual but it got me to wondering, as it does every time I see it, how a group of individual birds can move like a single entity. Are they somehow communicating with each other to determine the next turn, dive or swoop?

Turns out that there’s no communication going on at all, the birds are merely following some basic rules related to interactions with other birds in the flock:

Separation - avoid crowding neighbors
Alignment - steer towards average heading of neighbors
Cohesion - steer towards average position of neighbors

Measurements of bird flocking have been made using high-speed cameras, and a computer analysis has been made to test the simple rules of flocking ... It is found that they generally hold true in the case of bird flocking, but the long range attraction rule (cohesion) applies to the nearest 5-10 neighbors of the flocking bird and is independent of the distance of these neighbors from the bird…
~Wikipedia

Do you want to know something really freaky? Humans flock too. Yep, it seems that we’ll follow anyone if they seem to know where they’re going and we don’t have our own route planned. A study conducted in Cologne Germany by two biologists from the University of Leeds demonstrated a flock like behavior in humans.

Professor Krause, with PhD student John Dyer, conducted a series of experiments where groups of people were asked to walk randomly around a large hall. Within the group, a select few received more detailed information about where to walk. Participants were not allowed to communicate with one another but had to stay within arms length of another person.

The findings show that in all cases, the ‘informed individuals’ were followed by others in the crowd, forming a self-organizing, snake-like structure.

“We’ve all been in situations where we get swept along by the crowd,” says Professor Krause. “But what’s interesting about this research is that our participants ended up making a consensus decision despite the fact that they weren’t allowed to talk or gesture to one another. In most cases the participants didn’t realize they were being
led by others.”

Other experiments in the study used groups of different sizes, with different ratios of ‘informed individuals’. The research findings show that as the number of people in a crowd increases, the number of informed individuals decreases. In large crowds of 200 or more, five per cent of the group is enough to influence the direction in which it travels.
~PsychCentral

Video filmed by Dylan Winter at an RSPB reserve called Otmoor near Oxford England. Check this link for more information about what you are watching.



Does anyone else think that the creators of “Lost” have spent some time in Oxford?