![]() Our manager phoned me, asked what to do? She knew it was the end of the world, panic set in, sure it was germ warfare.” They slammed against the building, fish blood and knocking themselves out. They were heavy with sardines unable to fly and lost in the dense fog as they came in from the sea attracted by our lights. “Struggling to the door, I was awed at the sight of hundreds of birds-all with the cry of a baby. That’s what happened to the sooty shearwaters.Įdna Messini, proprietor of the Venetian Court Motel on the beach at Capitola in 1961, wrote about the day the birds came: Now consider if a fourth input was introduced to the flock of boids-a piece of malware instead of a computational rule. This math basically plays out in nature each time a flock takes flight. Input 3, alignment: match the speed and direction of the boids around you.Input 2, separation: don’t run into your flock mates.Input 1, coherence: fly close, to the other boids.He called his flying creatures, “boids.” Three simple steering behaviors guide them: In 1986, programmer Craig Reynolds made a three-dimensional flocking algorithm, which played out in an early computer animation. The effect has been described as a chorus line, one leg kicking after another. That’s because flocking birds aren’t just aware of their immediate neighbor they’re focusing on the small group of birds around them-up to six or seven of them. Unlike a flock of geese where there’s an obvious leader (imagine a flying “V”), any bird in a flock cluster-like what starlings or shearwaters fly in-can move in any direction and the others will follow suit. Which is still sort of true, because have you ever seen starlings fly? Their murmurations are surreal. At the turn of the 20th century, learned scientists considered “natural telepathy” or a “group soul” as a flock’s compass. So, in order to understand what happened, first you need to know how a flock of birds-like thousands of shearwaters-fly and move together.Īncient Romans said the gods guided flocking birds. But if flocking birds were easily confused in low visibility, which is pretty normal up and down coastal California, then shearwater invasions would be as common as passing rain. Prevailing theories at the time supposed the sooty shearwaters got lost in the fog. And less than two years later, Hitchcock’s The Birds premiered. After all, the famed director was adapting a particular 1952 Daphne du Maurier story into a screenplay on the subject of killer birds. “The word of the bird invasion spread fast throughout the state,” notes the article, “and a phone call came to The Sentinel from mystery thriller producer Alfred Hitchcock from Hollywood.” He requested a copy of that day’s paper. This is the bird: Ardenna grisea, the sooty shearwater. In the Santa Cruz Sentinel, August 18, 1961, there is an account of thousands of birds raining down from the sky at 3 a.m.-crashing into homes and cars in Capitola and Pleasure Point, California just off Monterey Bay. ![]()
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