Against the blue of the sky, starlings are shapeshifting, synchronising in sacred geometry as if the wind has taken on flesh and slipped from the invisible into the realm of the visible – wearing a black veil, flowing in unison with thousands of starlings.
The form and flight of each starling influence the murmuration, and yet they move collectively, changing colours, creating waves of light and dark as the distance between them swells and shrinks. Romans interpreted these patterns as a message from the gods. In 1931, ornithologist Edmund Selous hypothesised that starlings might communicate telepathically, calling it “a kind of madness in the sky.”
While I personally believe that the dimensions of madness and magic converge into each other, for what is not contained in explicable terms must bear some strangeness to be feared or revered. Perhaps this is what makes murmuration enthralling: the complexity and the structure are a sign of an intelligence that is not human and thus unknown to us.
Yet within our body, the same geometrical swarm movements govern biological principles. A simple cut, and in the words of biologist Janine Benyus, our “immune cells flock” like a “murmuration of starlings”, weaving layers and pulling the skin together. Meanwhile, somewhere else in the skies, the stars are held by gravity, forming their own swarms. And earthquakes might erupt in small intervals, in synchronisation, a geological pattern that echoes the rhythms of a swarm.
Perhaps the force of gravity that binds atoms to matter and cells to organisms is also at work in setting stars in motion, in murmurations, in erupting earthquakes, and in our bodies, following the same governing principles.
While the narratives of ecology and economy have been interpreted through hierarchical and linear understandings, placing humans above nature and mind above matter, murmurations and swarms invite us to look at these systems in unison, calling the body back to its community.
In murmuration, when one starling turns, all the others respond. Yet individuals are only following their seven neighbours, starting a ripple effect on a scale of hundreds to thousands and, at times, millions. Even our human systems behave like this: markets murmur with fluctuations of demand and supply, and language shifts as we gather new words and let them ripple through our shared meaning.
Internal and external continuously feed into each other, creating critical transitions at tipping points. In murmuration, waves and movement are created in response to stimuli: predators, daylight, temperature, and food. It makes me wonder: as our collective systems reach the tipping point of their own making, can critical transitions emerge from the models of murmuration? Can we possibly move in unison?
In murmuration, distant flocks often merge into each other to share information about food and roosting sites; a common, shared vision of survival and strength in numbers can unite flocks of hundreds into thousands. While our current systems are dysfunctional and corrupt, starlings remind us that as individuals, we too have a part to play in the community we inhabit. Even if we cannot witness an immediate ripple effect of our actions, by focusing attention on our immediate environment, we too can create change that moves entire systems, affecting the edge of the world, perhaps from the Arctic to the Amazon rainforest, from the global south to the north. What if we, too, can sustain distant geographies? And if so, will you take flight and join the flock? Will you murmur into the new meaning-making of the world that is emerging between madness and magic?
