This is Bird Note.

One of nature's enthralling spectacles is a flock of thousands of shorebirds flying wingtip to wingtip.

The huge flock seems to act like a single organism rolling and twisting in exquisite patterns.

To better understand how these shorebird flocks operate, scientists analyzed videos of them in flight.

Surprisingly, they found that flocks use a combination of two well-known organizational patterns.

One is a cluster. Lots of shorebirds flying together in a loose, three-dimensional cloud.

It's a marvel of precise action that allows the birds to confuse predators and to avoid colliding with one another.

The second kind of pattern is a basic V formation, or smaller groups of birds within the flock sync up in V shapes, like migrating geese.

The V formation has a different purpose to make flight more efficient as birds' information ride off the lift created by birds ahead of them.

The compound pattern combines the advantages of the cluster and the V formation to improve both predator avoidance and aerodynamic efficiency.

Head to birdnote.org to see videos of huge shorebird flocks in action. I'm Mary McCann.

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