HOW DO BIRDS MAKE DECISIONS?

I looked up from the bus stop.

Hundreds of birds were gathered in the tree on the other side of the road, loudly chirping and twittering in the morning sun. The wind ruffled the few remaining leaves, and the bare branches wavered against the blue sky. They were weighted with birds.

Then, as though their song had reached the double bars at the end of the score, they stopped singing, and then they flew off - all as one, leaving the silent tree shaking behind them!

Is that how it happens? Birds make group decisions by interweaving their melodies into a song? I can’t imagine making decisions by constantly singing over the top of people: it would just be chaos! And if this week has taught me anything, it’s that more than one simultaneous conversation is a bad idea if you don’t cope well with chaos.

And yet birds seem to be designed to do it - somehow a perfectly synchronised group-decision emerged from the chatter - no conductor, no facilitator, no encourager, no dictator, no leader, no queen. It was amazing!

Now, I totally get that bird song is complex. There might well have been a Type-1-Alpha-Bird counting down to lift-off in that tree. And those birds might well have been fully equipped to understand each different role as they sang together - there could have been conversations about which direction, about what to wait for, about who gets to sing 'go' or whatever. It's not for us to decipher - we make our decisions by a sort of clunky dance of listening and responding with words constructed into translated thoughts - it's a different world.

I did think for a while that this might be the pre-flight gathering for the annual winter journey to the South. The chatter seemed a bit like a holiday buzz - it had that excited feel to it. What a moment to witness - as soon as Type-1-Alpha-Bird hits that trill on a G flat, we're off for thousands of miles of ocean, and desert, and warm African winds.

Just as I was working out which way South was though, all the birds, the same passerine mass of twittering singers, circled back round through the blue sky, and landed back in the tree - where they immediately started singing once again. So I've no idea what that was all about.

It was lovely though.