The four types of birds – dunlin, short-billed dowitcher, American avocet, and marbled godwit – live in similar environments but greatly vary in size and fly at different speeds. ![]() The flocks ranged in size from a hundred to a thousand birds. In the experiments, digital cameras recorded video of 18 cluster-like flocks of four different species of birds flying over a bird sanctuary or agricultural fields. Such measurements may help scientists better understand why and how birds flock.Ĭorcoran and Hedrick now show that four different types of shorebirds position themselves in the same way when flying in a flock. The technology allows scientists to measure how birds position themselves in relation to other birds, or how flock-positioning varies by bird size, species, ecology, and behaviors. Advances in cameras and computers are now making it easier to track individual birds flying in large flocks. This is because it was difficult to take such measurements in large flocks of moving birds. Flying in a V-shaped formation likely also gives aerodynamic benefits that can make it easier to fly long distances.įew studies, however, have measured how the positions of birds in a flock relate to things like flying speed or the frequency of wing flaps. Flocks, for example, may help birds to avoid predators and to navigate. Many studies have tried to prove what causes birds to flock and how it benefits them. We explore multiple hypotheses regarding the benefit of this flock structure and how it differs from structures observed in other flocking species.īirds often fly in flocks ranging from very structured V-formations to unstructured clusters. We propose that this formation represents an intermediary between the cluster flocks of starlings and the simple-V formations of geese and other large migratory birds. This rule propagates outward to create a global flock structure that we term the compound-V formation. The rule, aligning with a one-wingspan lateral distance to nearest neighbors in the same horizontal plane, scales linearly with wingspan but is independent of nearest neighbor distance and neighbor species. ![]() Here, we identify an interaction rule that holds across single and mixed-species flocks of four migratory shorebird species spanning a seven-fold range of body masses. ![]() However, we know little about why animals adopt different interaction rules because of sparse sampling among species. Animal groups have emergent properties that result from simple interactions among individuals.
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