Paging Mr. Hitchcock...

[bjarvis]

I've been writing documentation fairly steadily since 8 AM. A few minutes ago, I left my cube to stare north out the windows to the horizon for a while to let my eyes relax. A distance away, I saw what I beleived to be faint smoke blowing west to east with the wind. After a moment, I realized it was actually a dense jetstream of flocking birds, something the size of a large sparrow.

Looking as far as I could to the east and west, I could see neither the start nor end of this flow: they simply faded off into the distance in each direction. I began picking out individuals in the stream and it was clear they were moving at a very quick pace. A full 2.5 minutes later, the end of the flock finally flew past.

That's a whopping huge number of birds.

Comments

[rsc.livejournal.com]

Hmm. If it were later i the day, I'd say probably starlings.

Outside of nesting season, starlings tend to roost in large colonies, and then spread out over the area during the day to feed, returning to the roosting site shortly before sunset. When I was a boy living in a series of apsrtments with views over the Hudson River, there was a huge gas storage tank on Riverside Drive that was the roosting site of every starling in the NYC area (including Westchester and northern NJ); it was estimated that something like 125,000 starlings spent their nights there. Late on winter afternoons we could look out our windows and see huge flocks of them streaming south along the river.

[trawnapanda.livejournal.com]

I suspect Robert's right, starlings. They congregate in eeNORmous flocks. And fly together en masse, looking almost like airborne schools of fish, there are so many.

(and apparently all dem starlings are descended from 120 birds imported by someone to NYC's Central park in the late 19th century who wanted samples of all birds mentioned in Shakespeare. There are now estimated to be 200 million starlings descended from the initial 120. Sigh.)