I disturbed the Sandpipers.
Earlier in the day, HW had phoned me at home to say that on the way to the store she saw hundreds gathered at the shore near the bridge over California Creek. She thought they were Plovers. More likely Sandpipers. Undisturbed, their phenotype is to forage the shoreline, piping their beaks into the sand in search of food. They don’t brook onlookers. Which is why HW said I should have my camera ready, you might catch them in a swoosh! What a spellbinding display that is to observe, never mind photograph. Because the thing is, if you get close, and these birds startle, they rise up suddenly in a disorganized frenzy and fly away. But then, as if there were a gene for group behavior, they rapidly self-organize out over the water. The swarm comes together into a cohesive avian object, a murmuration, the alternating pattern of brown wings and white breasts flares as it surges and swooshes, left and right, back and forth, up and down, daring the water’s surface, drawing evanescent lines in the air. It was magical to see. Until, that is, the magic turned to fury, and like I were living a Hitchcockian nightmare, it headed straight for me. Maybe still pissed at me for disturbing their forage, the swarm did a fly-by, coming within mere feet of my cowering self before turning a final time and flying away, as if to flip me off.
It was the best hour of my day. Parking the car, prowling the beach, sneaking up on a group of them. I was dressed in jeans, kneeling in an emulsion of mud and sand still wet from the outgoing tide. I had the camera in my right hand, steadying it on my left arm, which I’d formed into a makeshift support by gripping my right shoulder. (Internet pro-tip for field photographers). I couldn’t have been more than ten feet from the closest birds. Why haven’t they spooked yet? Surely they’ve sensed me by now. With no small stones within arms reach, I stood up and gently stepped closer. In a second they were off. I pointed the lens in the center of the confusion and pressed the shutter. Back at home I lightly cropped the photo, brought up the shadows and added some vibrancy. Click (or tap) the photo above, and then zoom, you’ll see there’s no evidence of order among those fifty or more birds in flight. It looks chaotic, each bird for himself – it’s remarkable enough they don’t collide in air. But I’m telling you, to stand there and watch, in mere seconds you’d witness the murmuration emerge
There’s a math that describes self-organized order in nature. But there’s no math I’m aware of that accounts for its immediate cause. Just as there’s no math to explain beauty in nature. What we have from biologists are not much more than just-so stories. My intuition is that disorganized chaos, not collected order, should be more difficult for predators to target. I mean, c’mon, the Sandpiper predator would only need to fly headlong into the swarm with its maw and talons wide open. Easy pickins. Compare that to the effort of fixing a bead on a single bird and chasing after it, possibly unproductively. Wasted effort.* True, there can be safety in numbers, but as every biologist will admit, one’s genetic endowment does not code for group behavior. Where order obtains in nature, it comes for free.
The plan for next time is to have HW and I coordinate, her on one end of the shore near the birds to startle them, while I’m down the beach steady and prepared to capture the magic as it swooshes by me.
* To be fair, note the diving bird (peregrine falcon?) at thirteen seconds; targeting a stray? Even so, every bird’s a stray absent a swarm.