Photos shared to social media claim to depict a swarm of starlings flying through the air often, incredibly, in the shape of a bird. One such photograph, for example, was shared on Reddit in 2019, crediting photographer Daniel Biber, and received over 22,000 upvotes at the time of this writing.
Photographer Daniel Biber captures one in a million photo doesn't realize until he gets home
byu/GytisG8 inpics
The above image is genuine, and its photographer, Biber, confirmed its authenticity in an email to Snopes. Brine published the photograph in a series on the World Photography Organisation's (WPO) website as part of its 2018 professional competition. Biber described the short-listed image as:
This series of images was captured in a 10-second window on the 31st, December 2016 near Sant Pere Pescador in Catalonia, Spain. For years I have observed huge flocks of starlings on the Costa Brava. It took me several days to scout out the location where the starlings gather at sunset to roost. I shot thousands of pictures and had the great luck to capture the moment that the murmuration took on the shape of a large flying bird - no retouches necessary! The shape then dissipated, and the birds began to reshape ending up as another impressive bird shape.
The previous year, one of the series' photographs won the Swiss Ornithological Institute 2017 international photo competition, "and the jury requested the RAW file to check whether there had been any manipulations," Biber said.
In a 2018 interview with WOP, Biber acknowledged that many thought his image was fake. He noted that his publication of the entire series – which includes 26 individual images – shows how the birds swarmed into formation.
The British Natural History Museum describes a starling murmuration as occurring when "huge groups of starlings take to the sky, swooping and swirling into spheres, planes and waves." Murmuration gets its name from the sound of "many flapping wings of a group of starlings in flight."
Murmurations are formed when starlings move in relation to each other, according to the museum, which adds:
When in flight, each starling matches their movements to the birds surrounding it. If one starling changes its flight direction or speed, the birds around it also change their flight direction or speed. This change spreads throughout the group and creates the patterns of the murmuration.
Models suggest that a starling flies at around 45 kilometres [28 miles] per hour and small variations in speed and direction create a murmuration.
It's unclear why starlings group into murmurations, but an analysis of roughly 3,000 starling murmurations over the 2015-16 winter found that birds of prey were recorded at nearly one-third of these events.
Biber's images are not the only ones to capture starlings in a bird-like formation.
Photographer Fiona Elisabeth Exon captured the below image showing a "vast bird-shaped murmuration flock of starlings," that were preparing to roost at dusk."
(Getty Images)
Getty Images, an online photo hosting website, also included in its database the below photo of a "starling cloud in the shape of an eagle during sunset."
(Getty Images)