A murmuration of starlings! Photo courtesy of Owen Humphrey AP. See the  spectacular video below this story.

Nature offers one of the most amazing feats of flight with a murmuration of starlings. What’s that ? Thousands to millions of the birds gather and go airborne — it looks like a fast-moving storm cloud, a twister, or a giant slinky toy,  slipsliding across the sky. Amazingly, they don’t collide while diving, rising,  and reforming their mass into a moving bundle of energy.

Here is a short film by Liberty Smith and Sophie Windsor Clive rowing on the River Shannon who captured the murmuration of starlings and are sharing it through Islands & Rivers Film. Link to the video

If you are really enthralled, you will find another, even more stunning sequence in the Nature episode we posted online in our Rewilding Europe series. It’s a short sequence — but breathtaking — in The Wild Balkans, a full-length PBS Nature series episode online and  free.  View the episode