THE SKY IS FLORIDIAN MYTHIC: a dazzling sun-gloss blue over ocean and palm trees. Cloud plumes rise like smoke on the horizon. But farther inland, fat heavy clouds line up in parallel, with bottoms so flat they look underlined. In this magical haze, a flock of flamingos pinking by would not seem odd. Instead a lone boat-tailed grackle glides steeply to the roof of a white stucco building where parked cars roost.
This is not a typical spring day in my hometown in upstate New York, ruled by red-winged blackbirds, lilacs, apple trees, and snowmelt. That both realities can exist at the same time, a thousand miles apart, continues to amaze me. The mind contains a million snow globes, shakes this one or that, and watches sand or snow fall in slow motion through the gels of memory.
As the sun seeps over the horizon, people crossing the street create shadows twice their body length, and it’s a little odd to see their upright bodies trailing perpendicular shadows. All is surface brilliance, the edges and faces shine, the shadows are slightly elongated and narrow. Is this what sculptor Alberto Giacometti saw, I wonder, the shadows we unknowingly drag along the ground behind us like tails we tend not to see?
When the sun strikes the dewy leaves of most any plant, frond, or bush, they spangle, and soon the chrome car bumpers splatter light like stars. The sun has crystallized the colored carapaces humans use for travel, armor, and display. Just because we didn’t evolve the beetle’s shell or the armadillo’s plates doesn’t mean we can’t fabricate our own. The clouds lose their oatmeal heaviness and lie still, puddled in light. At last the sun rises high enough that I feel its warm breath on my face, a soft dry heat as mind and day dawn.
With a noise between a whinny and a dying train whistle, a collared dove pops into view ten inches in front of my nose, tail flared wide, wings furiously back-flapping. Moments before, I was calmly watching the sea, where a pink and gray sunrise echoed the cheap linoleum in 1950s motels. The uprising dove didn’t see me lying on a chaise beside the white balustrade, its balustrade, not my balcony rail.
Presto chango, it stalls and turns in midair while fixing me with one glossy black eye. A shiny eye, despite the early hour. Mar, mar, mar, it complains as it settles on a railing only a yard away. Then it swaggers to the next balcony, and launches itself up to the Moorish roof where domed terracotta tiles make perfect dovecotes.
The dove descending breaks the air / With flame of incandescent terror, T. S. Eliot writes in The Four Quartets. This one doesn’t seem alarmed by our encounter; collared doves tolerate humans. With the climate changing and garden birds winging farther south to find new niches, doves have begun paying regular house calls. Frequent visitors, they seem to enjoy city life among humans, we endless purveyors of garbage and other handouts, as much as humans do.
Partly folding their wings to lose altitude, they look like experimental jets darting down to land, and they’re heavy enough to pick up real speed. The landing itself is usually a controlled stall, with tail feathers spread like a Sioux headdress beneath them and wings rapidly beating. I like to watch doves throttle their flutter speed—from a polite fanning (think gloved women in drawing rooms) to frantic dippy correctives. Their relatives, the mourning doves, zigzag more and sometimes whistle as they fly, but also like to camp out with humans. To enough of us, the informal naming committee, their oh-woo-woo-woo sounds like the melancholy lament of pallbearers, and so we condemn them to endless mourning.
Two flocks of collared doves roller-coaster through the air, each bird distinct as they flap to a high point, then suddenly turn with a flash of pale bellies and rocket down the sky, careening around a sharp invisible bend to zoom up the sky again for another rush downhill. Over and over the two flocks ply the winds, often crossing in midair, then shuffling like a deck of cards, only to fly apart perfectly unscathed into their fugitive mobs. How do they avoid each other at such speed while being carried along by high winds? I’ve never seen any collide and fall. Surely these calisthenics, scary as they must be at times, rouse them from stupor, get their blood flowing, and test their mettle. Which bird leads? Are stragglers noticed and judged?
Although their mass intuition to wheel and turn appears almost telepathic, it’s emergent behavior—a term sometimes used to describe consciousness in humans—a knowing that materializes when individuals (doves, cells, bees, neurons) unwittingly work in unison. The tiny ghost ants that flit across Floridian floors don’t require a plan to forage, build nests, create a bustling colony. Following pheromone footprints and counting their steps, each ant need only stumble upon a few cooperative neighbors. From that random mix a rambunctious organism can emerge with its own distinctive caste system and behaviors. If it prospers, it thrives. So, too, the myriad cells in a human brain, any one of which is witless. Mind results solely from the relation of the parts to the whole, the genius of the swarm. Nature promotes the crowd of individuals, the one among the many, the single doves and the wheeling flock that moves as one enterprise.
With gray-pink head and wings the color of wet sand, the adults sport a thin black and white band around the back of the neck. U-nite-id, they coo while roosting, and sometimes I don’t know. When they fly, they stop singing and cry out a nasal kwurr kwurr!
I’m not sure why the doves settle, take wing a few minutes later, settle, fly like a single knife blade icing the sky, settle again, fly again. Maybe they circle and perch until most are content with their neighbors. When only a few gather, they sit a body-width apart, which seems to be the personal space they prefer. If crowded, they bunch tight as straphangers on a subway and they squabble more.
Can there really be no leader? Watching each morning, I haven’t detected one. When they lift off and fly suddenly, they always appear galvanized but startled, whipped up by some other bird’s whim. More chaos theory than marching orders. Other animals herd, school, cluster, huddle, crowd, swarm to gain safety in numbers, with a hundred eyes scouting instead of two (eight in the case of migrating tarantulas). The laggards fly at risk and are easier to pick off. Veering and whirling with apparent randomness, the flock becomes too erratic to predict. A hawk, owl, or other predator won’t focus on any one dove and risk plunging into a mass of beaks. Flocking is far safer, makes navigation easier, and food and nest areas quicker to find.
In a 1984 issue of Nature, Wayne Potts published his research on sandpipers which he filmed and then studied frame by frame. Any bird could rally the flock with a slight movement that spread quickly as a “maneuver wave.” He found that birds only followed other birds banking into the flock, not away from it, because leaving the flock was dangerous. A simple rule, it protects individuals from being nabbed by predators, but also from having to make many decisions.
What’s wondrous and strange is that when a maneuver wave begins it moves through the flock faster than the reaction time of any one bird. In his lab, Potts tested a bird’s reaction time to a light flash: 38 milliseconds. Yet maneuver waves spread at less than 15 milliseconds. Not for all the birds. The first to follow suit usually takes about 67 milliseconds. Potts speculates that the birds farthest away from the “initiator” see the wave coming and get ready to react, an instinct he calls the “chorus-line hypothesis,” after the Radio City Rockettes and other lines of synchronized high-kicking dancers. Films of chorus lines support his hypothesis. If one dancer suddenly begins a high kick, the others react one after the other at intervals of 108 milliseconds, even though the visual reaction time of humans is 194 milliseconds. Although we’re the most social animal on the planet, we rarely speak of our own conjoined intelligence, how often we operate as flocks, yearning to “fit in.” We say, and really mean: “Let’s put our heads together.” Too easily, perhaps, we follow the crowd, join cults and congregations, adopt the path and view of the herd. We form committees, charities, militias, political parties, think tanks, symposia, juries—like doves, we eagerly become part of one biological cadence.
Even on windless days, doves flock and swoop, veering aimlessly over parking lots and sunlit terracotta walls, tourists and locals. Any movement by one bird, however random, can press the flock to change direction, speed, or altitude. Based on simple rules, their actions and reactions result in winged complexity. In 1986, computer wizard Craig Reynolds created what he called “boids,” perfect flocking organisms that inhabit only computers. By studying them, Reynolds arrived at three rules they follow: (1) separation—steer to avoid flock mates; (2) alignment—adopt the heading of flock mates; and (3) cohesion—stay close to flock mates. Computer-generated flocks of bats and penguins based on boids were first used in the film Batman Returns in 1992, and have appeared in many other films since then. And, based on flocking algorithms, the British firm Swarm Systems will soon market an UltraSwarm, a flying cluster of computerized “Owls” that can fly and work together without colliding. The U.S. military is particularly interested in these packs of swarming robots that know how to cooperate, some small as wrens or dragonflies, others creeping spiderlike to scout inside buildings.
Not boids, but real collared doves arrive from several directions, turn loosely above the crowded wires and settle, unsettling others who take wing, loop around the neighborhood, and return. They are restless this morning, and grab the wires for only a moment or two, then arise like a shake of pepper, scatter, split into separate cohorts, reassemble shoulder to shoulder, take flight again with the sun bouncing off their white belly feathers each time they turn in unison. Does the sun feel hot on their bellies? I think so. Rain-soaked birds often stand with wings outstretched, drying in the sun.
The doves perch and reassemble faster than I can track their whims in ink. Now they are evenly spaced, like black rivets, against the cloud-mottled sky. I wonder if they can feel our vocal vibrations humming in their feet. With the sound of someone casually opening a paper bag, the doves lift up all at once from the telephone wires. Undulating, they edge into and out of sight, sweeping palm-flat overhead, as they skid slantwise across the sky, with some fliers dropping out of existence into a pocket of fog, only to reappear magically elsewhere. Once more they settle on the wires.
My mind’s binocular lens swoops straight to one particular dove, whose wing flapping I imagine in my own wing muscles, whose feathers lifted by the cool breeze lift my windblown hair. Sound churns in my chest and burbles up my throat automatically. I recognize my neighbors beside me on the telephone wire, do not feel threatened by them, do not touch them unless the breeze blows just hard enough to unsettle me and then my wings spring back, up, and flap, my feet release, and I touch feathers on both sides as I settle, unsettling them. I feel the sun baking my feathers, the faint telephone wire hum in my feet, the mindless upflapping, banking, and planing.
I remember skidding airplanes across the sky like that, on purpose, to lose altitude on final. Oh, but what clumsy and rigid wings humans use, so limited in the subtle flexions of bird flight. In birds, feather windows open on upbeats, close on downbeats; they feel the air breathing through their wings. In airplanes, we open stiff heavy doors on our extended wings (pilots call the doors flaps), and let air slip between plates of metal.
At 7:00 a.m. the humans emerge in vehicles and on foot, while great flocks of doves dance and swoop above them, and cars pass with the sound of breaking waves. A yellow cab arrives and a young man in blue jeans and orange shirt tosses a suitcase and a carry-on into the trunk, slams metal on metal, squeaks the back door open, and climbs in, slamming the door after him, as he sets off to join the rest of his flock. Only ten minutes later, a brightness indivisible from the idea of day settles, illuminating everything.