On its own, a single starling doesn’t elicit much fuss. It’s a tennis-ball-sized bird, glossy black in winter, purplish or green in summer, and in autumn, sometimes speckled with white spots. But when ...

A swirling “bird tornado” over farmland near Torrington turned out to be a flock of European starlings. While a sight to see, ...

After weeks of regular murmuration exhibitions by starlings in the sky above Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, a local resident finally filmed the birds flying in hypnotic patterns above his ...

The European starling -- long known as a virtuoso songbird and as an expert mimic too -- may also soon gain a reputation as something of a "grammar-marm." This three-ounce bird, new research shows, ...

Video of a massive starling flock turning and twisting over a river in Ireland has gone viral, and with good reason. Flocking starlings are one of nature's most extraordinary sights: Just a few ...

You incorrectly use the flocking of starlings in murmurations to illustrate the concept of 'active matter' in determining the physics of life (Nature 529, 16–18; 2016). This behaviour depends on ...

Why is a flock of starlings like a glass of water? The answer is that both are complex systems with many parts acting together as one. The Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Giorgio Parisi has ...

Photographer Richard Barnes was in Rome in 2005 and 2006 working on finishing his book, Animal Logic. As it turned out, he got more material for the book as well as a new project. During a day in ...

At least some birds can learn a pattern once proposed as unique to the grammars of human languages, say researchers. Starlings trained in a lab have learned to distinguish between sounds strung ...