Woman Records 'Murmuration' Of Starlings In Broken Arrow

A woman shared her video of a huge flock of starlings in synchronous flying in Broken Arrow Wednesday night.

Jennifer Andrasko said she was with her mother and grandmother near 101st and Aspen when they saw the huge flock of starlings.

The three women were mesmerized by what they saw.

"We witnessed a beautiful moving painting in the sky put on by what appears to be starlings!" she wrote in an email to News On 6.

According to allaboutbirds.org, it's called a murmuration.

The site says Grainger Hunt, a senior scientist at the Peregrine Fund, wrote in Living Bird magazine that they're almost always caused by a falcon nearby.

He says what appears to be a beautiful display of flying is often the result of the starlings trying to get away from a predator.

The site says scientific research has demonstrated that flocks use a complex physical phenomenon known as scale-free correlation. It says when one starling changes direction or speed, every other bird responds to the change nearly simultaneously. Information moves across the flock very quickly and almost perfectly.

In other words, a starling on one side of the flock responds to what others are doing all the way across the flock.