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Murmurations
Shoshin
No one in particularNowhere Special Veteran
When watching these murmuration youtube clips (or having the good fortune to see this spectacular event unfold in real time/life) have you ever imagined how they relate to the five aggregates... consciousness, sensation, perception, mental formation and form, bundles of vibrating karmic energy, going with the flow, the self in motion ….
Is this how we(our movements) would look under a powerful microscope ? (Just my thoughts running wild)
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Trying to give up being ultra-spiritual. Going for more discerning and judgemental. So far is going well.
3 dimensional line dancing.
I was thinking that it's possible the vipassana practitioner could connect with the vibrating sensation...the body being just a bundle of vibrating matter, subatomic particles/energy...Again it's just the thoughts thinking out loud....
Indeed.
A sort of new age word salad perhaps? Too discerning or just judgemental?
Or Quantum Physics perhaps ?
Doubtful. Just observation. On the part of the birds, that is.
It's been discovered that each bird merely keeps an eye on the six surrounding neighbours: Those at 10 and 2 o'clock, those at 9 and 3, and those at 4 and 8 o'clock (remember they have their eyes on the sides of their head).
They don't need to know what the whole flock is doing, just those other six. But bear in mind, EVERY bird is doing this. So they all move in co-ordinated waves, purely according to what those neighbours are doing.
Kestrels and sparrow-hawks may have a field-day, you might think. All that food in one place.
Not so. It's actually almost impossible for them to catch their food that way, so close-knit are the movements of the flock....
I used to live in Aldershot, and although it has now been removed, there used to be a massive gasometer at the end of the road. In the spring and summer months, the entire county's population of starlings (well, it looked like it!) would gather there, covering every square inch of perch-able space. Most of our road's inhabitants would be alerted to this gathering by the sheer volume of chirping and calls... and we'd all come out onto the pavement, and subsequently be treated to some of the most breathtaking, amazing aeronautical displays... we'd stand, at times for nearly an hour, just gazing in sheer awe and wonder at this..."cloud" of birds..... And we'd all feel privileged.
(Those gifted with the duty of maintaining and cleaning the gasometer of bird-poo were probably less grateful.....
)
I know this isn't exactly the same but countless starlings and crows for miles around Vancouver all flood the skies each evening in waves from all directions towards one sleeping site. Does this happen anywhere else?
Well, yeah, I just said it did....? I'm not sure what you're asking or why....? Serious, here....
Mostly a seniors moment but
I am so used to tourists gawking at Vancouvers nightly recreation of the Hitchcocks movie "The Birds, that I wondered how uncommon it was.
(apart from here and Aldershot)
I think it's a nightly spectacle not to say a hugely destructive problem - in Rome.
The Guano is apparently so corrosive, that the very fabric of ancient buildings and monuments, not to mention cars, streets and people - is being threatened.
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My apologies...When I said "Have you ever imagined" I was thinking of the self in motion, all the tiny atomic particles moving in slow motion, in unison like the murmuration ...But I guess it didn't come out right ....
Oh well back to the birds crapping all over the place and murmuration....
What can I say.... creativity & destruction.... "shit happens"...and some tiny islands in the South Pacific and elsewhere welcome the seabird crap and put it to good use....
I've witnessed this 'out of town', like at my sister's place in rural southwest WA, and at my grandparent's old place on a bay near Olympia. The starlings were especially thick at my sister's place, and crows or ravens at my grandparents'.
Exactly, shoal fish use this technique too. They switch off any brain function that interferes with the co-ordination fixation, to allow direct eye to body response time. Martial artists use something similar, called 'body memory', where the response to an attack is instinctual rather than thought about which would be too slow.
The fact that we are mesmerised by this phenomena shows that we as predators tend to watch rather than hunt. However fishermen, like dolphins make use of this behavour.
warning:
this video contains mammalian on fish dukkha lessons . . .
couldn't tell you. If we are living life ala The Truman Show, I've wondered what we look like from a distance, too. More like ants in an ant hill than organized bird formations, I think.
That said, I love birds. It's funny, growing up I thought older people were nuts. Pfft, birds, what about 'em? Now I could watch for hours. And listen. We live along a major north/south bird migration path and I love this time of year. An opportunity to see both birds migrating from the north AND the south. Birds we only see a couple weeks out of the year. It's amazing how nature has it figured out to work as a system. The squirrel looks for particular seeds in the feeder. As a result, he kicks the smaller seeds out all over the ground. But those are the exact seeds the ground scavenging birds seek out. The deer come for larger bread chunks, and leave crumbs behind for smaller critters. The deer drop their antlers, and provide nutrition for rodents. Nature really is quite amazing. It's strange how we are so outside of it. I often wonder what our place truly is in the web of life. That's my murmur-ation for the moment, lol.
A food source ?
Entropy rules!