Murmurations, flamboyances & other animal congregations

This (pretty magical) video of a massive, swirling flock of starlings has been making us – and thousands of other nature lovers – gasp with wonder.

(Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo)

Aside from the spectacle itself (the Telegraph does a great job of explaining the “mathematics of murmurating”), it’s the word that really piques your interest: murmuration. Curious, unfamiliar – and yet perfect for evoking the sound of all those wings beating in unison as the starlings seamlessly come together, break apart and reunite (amazingly, without any midair mishaps).

Gone murmurating...Back in the morning. Image via Timm Nüchter, Flickr.

And there’s a lexicon of equally amazing collective nouns to explore – if you care to look beyond that textbook “gaggle of geese”. Take the flamboyance of flamingos. What other phrase could properly capture that outrageous, excessive display of pink?

And then there’s the neat, black-and-white parcel of penguins, and, oddly, a rabble (meaning a ‘mob’) of butterflies (are those delicate little insects really so disorderly?). Mobs, after all, are much more suited to meerkats – if you’ve ever seen a band of the mad mongooses, you’ll know why.

Not all collective nouns, of course, were created equal: some are a little trite (a tower of giraffes – yawn); others, a little obscure (a bike of wasps??). But most are packed with descriptive power – like an obstinacy of buffalo and a murder of crows. And what about a dazzle of zebras – one neat phrase that inadvertently hints at a zebra herd’s knack for stupefying predators by merging together into a stripey hodgepodge.

Now let’s end off with a bizarre flourish: a pungent of sasquatch. Since nobody has succeeded in proving the existence of these hairy cryptids, we can only imagine what a pungent of them might look – and smell – like.