Flocking/Swarming Behavior of Birds

We all remember "The Birds" by Hitchcock. Reliving parts of the video recently gave me the shivers! A swarm of birds can be intimidating. But, in real life, I find it very fascinating. When you first notice them, it is at a distance. It almost looks like smoke in the air. Only until the radical movement of what you thought was smoke continually shifts, do you realize it is birds. It is the "synchronization" of their performance that is curious. How do they move so fast and not fly into each other?

Photo credit top left: http://happytoshare.tumblr.com (Richard Barnes)

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Of course, fish and other under water creatures perform a similar behavior but it is called shoaling and schooling. This swarming or flocking behavior is indeed a science. In fact, computer simulations and mathematical models which have been developed to emulate the flocking behaviors of birds, can generally be applied also to the "flocking" behavior of other species. As a result, the term "flocking" is sometimes applied, in computer science, to species other than birds.

According to Wikipedia, Flocking behavior has rules:

1. Separation (behavior) - avoid crowding neighbors (short range repulsion)
2. Alignment (behavior) - steer towards average heading of neighbors
3. Cohesion (behavior) - steer towards average position of neighbors (long range attraction)

With these three simple rules, the flock moves in an extremely realistic way, creating complex motion and interaction that would be extremely hard to create otherwise.

There is a theory known as the Brownian motion. Scientific studies have been done to model how individuals form swarms through escape and pursuit interactions. Such research has been done via Brownian motion on locust swarms. Brownian motion (named after the Scottish botanist Robert Brown) is the seemingly random movement of particles suspended in a fluid (i.e. a liquid or gas) or the mathematical model used to describe such random movements, often called a particle theory.

Notes: Wikipedia