In nature, there’s something called a murmuration, which is when hundreds or thousands of small or medium-sized birds gather and form a shape-shifting cloud. Flying in a coordinated way, they can create truly fascinating shapes.
Recently, a German photographer named Daniel Biber was able to witness to such a spectacle in northeastern Spain, and he captured what he saw using his camera.
The birds—or starlings, as they’re called, as that’s the name of the biological family to which the birds belong—were likely reacting to a predator in the area.
The images caught by Biber earned him a lot of acclaim and a prize in a photography competition. Curiously, however, he didn’t even realize at first what he had accomplished, at least not until he arrived at his home and looked at the pictures he had captured on his computer. For days, Biber had tried—and failed—to capture images of the birds doing their murmuration thing before, but he hadn’t been successful.
Look at the pictures and you’ll see why what Biber captured on film is so extraordinary.
This picture adequately sums up exactly why Biber won an international prize for his photography. It more or less looks like either a bird or an angel. Even it didn’t resemble anything in particular, the thousands of birds in front of that colorful sky makes for a beautiful image.
Even the picture of Biber doing his thing is aesthetically pleasing simply due to the surroundings in which he found himself. The German photographer was in northeastern Spain’s Costa Brava. In this picture, Biber was trying to photograph the bird formation that would earn him international acclaim. He went to the same spot for four days trying to capture images of the murmuration.
To me, his picture sort of looks like a penguin with a long tail, and the penguin is attached to the Earth via an umbilical cord. You may see something completely different.
As the thousands of birds reacted to a predator—a vulture or hawk, perhaps—they formed this shape. To me, it sort of looks like an angel with a flowing gown who is flying through the sky as the sun set in the background. Biber and many others think it looked like a bird.
The sunset, again, is lovely. In this picture, the birds seemed to want to make the shape of the face of a fish-type creature. Maybe a dolphin? It took only seconds for the birds to create that formation.
This high-quality picture of the bird’s formation also looks like an angel with a flowing gown, at least to me. How birds can flock like this is fascinating.
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