Tag Archives: TV

A Murmuration

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Lately there has been an explosion of news on the major networks, NBC and CNN to name just two, about murmurations. Well two rather small announcements actually, one very visible and the other I sort of had to hunt around for. But when was the last time you heard anything about murmurations at all. Been a donkey’s age hasn’t it. One murmuration was in Israel and the other was in England, where they go absolutely nuts about anything birds do.

So what is a murmuration you might ask, well according to Wiktionary it is as follows,

murmuration (plural murmurations)

  1. An act or instance of murmuring. (I know, that really helps doesn’t it.)
  2. A flock of Starlings.

What it appears to be in real life, is a huge flock of birds, usually starlings but can be other kinds too. This flock photographed at Bosque del Apache wildlife refuge, is made up of mostly red-winged blackbirds. They gather together in extra-humongous numbers that apparently makes them kind of nuts or something, as they will all take off and fly around aimlessly but enthusiastically, until one of them decides to land, then they all land at once and make noise. This is repeated endlessly.

There are supposedly many scientific studies that explains why they do this. Money has been spent and mans hours accrued by these scientists watching these birds to figure this stuff out. They say that they have figured out why there is this nutso behavior and have published their findings in some awfully prestigious publications. I looked at one and all I can say is it made my brain hurt, your mileage may vary. If you really have to know what they said, Google murmuration – expensive scientific studies, and it’ll tell you more than you ever wanted to know.

Of course our scientific community here at *The Institute has already figured this all out and we didn’t bill the government doodley-squat in American dollars. We sent a team out to look at them, those red-winged blackbirds, take some pictures, kind a talk amongst themselves for a while, go to lunch, take a short nap after lunch, come back out, check them out one more time and come home. Total cost about 12 bucks for hamburgers at McDonald’s, which we fronted out of our own pockets thank you very much.

 Our conclusions were a little different from the scientific types and as we chose to use American, as spoken by everybody on TV as our language, this makes our report a little simpler to understand. Here it is in a nutshell.

These birds are not your average run of the mill dummies. Yeah some of them may look goofy but they’re not. They learn by watching and when they see one of their neighbors grab a seed out of the dirt or find a worm or something they pay attention. They are also greedy by nature and want that worm or seed for themselves so they go right over there and try to take it away from that guy. All of these birds in one place at once, squabbling over a bug causes a commotion, and some of the other birds and it only takes one, freak, jump up into the air and that tears it. Now they all jump into the air and being paranoid figure that the other guy knows where the better food is and they are not going to let him out of their sight for a second.

Hence the flying around in perfect unison. They pack so tightly together that nobody in the middle can even see anything so the guy on the bottom of that murmuration gets a chance to see something, like a juicy bug down there in the weeds, and goes for it. When that happens the result is everybody dives for the ground and you get ‘murmuration’. One of our observers came up with the thought that they fly so close together because they totally believe the guy next to him knows where he’s going, when the truth is not one of all those birds, and we’re talking like, thousands, have a clue. Yes, it creates pretty patterns in the sky but it is not a display of higher intelligence.

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Murmuration is said to be derived from an old English word or medieval Latin, ‘murmuratio’, the meaning of which supposedly sounds like the murmuring of a crowd from the sound the huge flocks of starlings make as they form at dusk, back then when it was medieval. Well it does if the crowd is making a screechy, raspy, squawky noise similar to fingernails on a blackboard and you have a hangover. But since this word ‘murmuratio’ comes from old English who even back then really liked all things birds, they probably thought it sounded beautiful. To each his own. Just remember these English guys medieval or not, like warm beer and eggs fried to the point of incineration. Just sayin’.

Murmuration is a world-wide event that the media is trying to play up as a special thing that only happens in exotic places like Europe and the Middle east but nothing could be further from the truth. We’re having murmurations all over the place right here in the USA. This one was in New Mexico, we saw one up in Wyoming of Franklin gulls visiting for  a day that put on a great show, and that was just a bird squawk above the state line from Colorado.

I hope we’ve taken some of the mystery out of Murmurations and helped you to understand one of Nature’s little quirks before you get led astray by expensive and some say unreliable studies even if they get on TV. As always if you have any questions about this subject or anything else for that matter, call us, drop us a line, we’re from The Institute and we’re here to help.

*Note: For those of you unfamiliar with The Institute and what it does, please see the page labeled The Institute on the Menu Bar above. That should explain everything. You shouldn’t have one single question remaining regarding The Institute after reading it. None. For those of you favored few who already know about the Institute, Never mind. Return to your daily activities. Thank you for your support.

I Can See You, You Know

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Many of you loyal readers, and you know who you are, who have been following us for any length of time know that we here at the Institute often do top-secret work for the government as part of our charter. Various organizations come to us hat in hand, begging, threatening ,cajoling to have use of our facilities and the various programs and researchers that we have in the works at all times. Being primarily a wildlife and nature front, I mean, organization, our primary mission has always been to bring you new and old research, anything that will make us a buck, that will better your life and allow us to continue receiving those fat checks we get monthly.

Imagine our surprise when we learned that we were part of a clandestine program conducted by some super secret organization whose name can not be revealed but whose initials are NSA, to eavesdrop on the American public for God knows what purpose. We were shocked at the audacity of this program. Shocked right out of our BVD’s. How dare they? We’ve been accused by our critics of doing anything for money but even we have our limits. If it hadn’t been for that guy, what’s his name, the squealer who leaked all that secret stuff, Justin Arrange or whatever his name is, spilling his guts and naming us as one of the perps in this ongoing mess, we never would have found out about it.

Here’s the real deal. We had been studying the amazing ability that marmots, the golden ones not the hoarys, have in receiving, and now we’ve recently discovered in transmitting, the information broadcast in the C-band radio — radio in the 3.7-gigahertz (GHz) to 6.4-GHz frequency range and the digital broadcast in the Ku frequency range (11.7 GHz to 14.5 GHz ). In other words Television. Yup. TV. What we hadn’t put together yet was that also included computers and you know what that means, the Internet.

To break it down further into language that we can understand, not that geek-speak where you listen and nod your head sagely like you understand what that fool is talking about but you really don’t have a freaking clue, this means that marmots, beneath that cute fur and those stubby little ears, have the ability to spy on us and worse, tell everybody else what we’re doing. Think about that for a second. You’re sitting there in front of your computer in the morning and you accidentally slide your finger up into your nose, just for a second mind you, and somewhere probably close by, there is a marmot surveillance team monitoring your isp address and suddenly you’re going viral on YouTube. You don’t know, that’s what clandestine means, you’re sitting there with a red nostril oblivious to the fact that some one in Bolivia is squirting milk out of his nose watching you.

Well, we’re not having it. That program is going down, regardless of how much it costs us in grant money, we’ve cashed the check already anyway. There will be no more using our defenseless wildlife to spy on the American public. We have taken steps to counteract this program. They are harsh steps but we feel, necessary ones. The only way we have found to deactivate a trained marmot is to deactivate it permanently. It is no longer a case of a ‘Good Marmot is a Dead Marmot’ instead it is “A Dead Marmot is A Silent Marmot’. We’ve found that by Googling ‘marmot, the preparing of ‘ there are many recipes on the very net we are trying to protect and save, for the preparation and serving of freshly cooked marmot. I know, I know, but we have to do something, our reputation is at stake. Besides the staff kind of likes it, says it tastes like chicken or emu and it’s rich in vitamin C so we see it as a win-win situation. We save the country and cut our food costs at the same time.

The cost of this self-sacrificing action has been huge, costing us that grant that we had and basically prohibiting the chances of obtaining any more money at that trough, but due to the fact that we are constantly submitting new ones, grants that is, under different names, the chances of this being a permanent setback are few. These guys don’t talk to each other and since their marmot listening stations have been going dark lately at a hell of a clip, (we have a lot of staff to feed) they’re like a blind guy in a brassiere factory. They don’t have a clue. We’ve told them that we think the marmots have developed some kind of virus and unfortunately in attempting to discover a cure we’ve lost every patient on the operating table. So unless one of you guys decides to leak this info, you won’t will you, we’re home free. OK then, mum’s the word. And remember until we’ve made this country of ours free from the scourges of the nefarious plans of those who would violate our privacy, watch what you’re doing when you sit there, because somebody else is.