"It's called a murmuration - the bird dance, an aerial ballet with tens of thousands of starlings, grackles, cowbirds and red-wing blackbirds flying in … The researchers, led by George Young at Princeton, did their own analysis of murmuration images to see how the birds adjust to their flockmates. ‘Many of these, including tiding of magpies, murmuration of starlings, unkindness of ravens, and exaltation of larks, are poetic inventions that one can trace back to the fifteenth century.’ 2 literary mass noun The action of murmuring. These beautiful starlings were filmed in Israel as tens of thousands of starlings fly in a massive murmuration in the skies above Rahat. Noun: 1. murmuration - a low continuous indistinct sound; often accompanied by movement of the lips without the production of articulate speech It is a highly interdisciplinary topic. They determined that starlings in large flocks consistently coordinate their movements with their seven nearest neighbors. murmuration meaning: 1. a large group of birds, usually starlings, that all fly together and change direction together…. The RSPB say this can be as early as September in some places, and as late as the end of November elsewhere, with more birds joining the nightly displays during this time. Watching starling murmurations as the birds swoop, dive and wheel through the sky is one of the great pleasures of a dusky winter's evening. The mesmerizing act is typically seen at the beginning of winter, right before dusk, as the birds look for a place to roost for the night. Swarm behaviour, or swarming, is a collective behaviour exhibited by entities, particularly animals, of similar size which aggregate together, perhaps milling about the same spot or perhaps moving en masse or migrating in some direction. A sunset murmuration of starlings, as thousands of birds head to roost in Somerset Levels marshes, in England's Somerset county # Tim Graham / Getty Read more Learn more. A murmuration, or flock of starlings, here includes thousands of these tiny birds collectively flying and swirling about. See more. Starling murmurations happen when the birds start to roost. Another word for murmuration. Find more ways to say murmuration, along with related words, antonyms and example phrases at Thesaurus.com, the world's most trusted free thesaurus. Murmuration definition, an act or instance of murmuring. When is the best time to see a starling murmuration?