As I opened the front door, a giant hawk glided from the thorny bael tree that is a thirsty tangle of thin branches bleached bare by the harsh drought. The raptor stared at me with fierce golden eyes and casual indifference, as it settled on the neighbour’s soot-streaked roofline, before spreading strong wings and soaring into the silence of the smoking dusk.
He is the patriarch of a fine family that rules the rich hunting ground of our neighbourhood, fed by a small, polluted but vital stream and a tough strip of grown trees that wind their way along the curving dry banks, with eroded expanses of ochre soil revealing a network of roots. Some of these giants once looked over acres of green canefields, now left to shrivelled scrub and surviving stragglers of the grass genus Saccharum, which feed the frequent fires flouncing along the busy highway, flushing prey and predator.
I admired the birds diving and drifting in the air currents, their calls confident and clear as they circled high over a wide expanse of territory, ignoring the triangular flocks of elegant egrets flying home in elongated, white lines and the concerned chirps of the plentiful songbirds concealed behind the cascade of mango leaves. A few brave souls dared to dart out in a defensive display of dive bombs, but the hawks were full, relaxed and posed no immediate threat, wheeling and screaming their evening dominance.
Yellow-headed caracaras swept by screeching earlier that morning, followed by the daily visiting groups of native garden birds such as the great keskidee and the similar-coloured smaller kingbird. Busy ground doves, chatty pairs of tanagers, shiny black grackles, aggressive grey and white mockingbirds and silent spectacled thrushes who always look surprised given their prominent yellow eye rings, all come to the feeders and much used bird bath.
There are no European starlings thankfully. Eugene Schieffelin, an American amateur ornithologist with a passion for William Shakespeare wanted to introduce all the birds mentioned in the Bard’s plays to North America, so he released 60 starlings into New York City’s Central Park, one fateful snowy day back in 1890, and 40 more, a year later. According to the Smithsonian, the American Acclimatization Society, to which Schieffelin belonged, introduced other foreign avian species named in Shakespeare’s work, ranging from nightingales to skylarks but none survived. There was no reason to believe that starlings would fare any better. But the birds found shelter beneath the eaves of the nearby American Museum of Natural History, and they lasted through the winter. Now their descendants number more than 200 million distributed across most of the continent, becoming one of the most successful invasive avian species and a ubiquitous bully and pest.
Starlings flock together in fascinating, flowing formations called “murmurations,” turning and twisting through the sky in a mysterious, coordinated dance of thousands and even millions. Often sparked by a predator like a hawk or falcon, the flock’s mesmerising movements are based on safety in numbers, but scientists puzzled for decades how each bird sensed the sudden shifts and managed to manoeuvre in perfect unison.
With high-powered video analysis and computational modelling, they recently discovered starlings work with advanced physics rather than basic biology. The flock moves in patterns best described with mathematical equations of “critical transitions” where systems are poised to tip or change, and the velocity of one bird affects the velocity of all the rest.
A key study published in 2013, acknowledged that flocks of starlings “exhibit a remarkable ability to maintain cohesion as a group in highly uncertain environments and with limited, noisy information.” Individual starlings within large flocks respond to a fixed number of six or seven of their nearest neighbours, optimising the trade-off between group cohesion and individual effort.
The results suggest that this “robustness to uncertainty” while maintaining consensus, may have been a factor in the evolution of flocking for starlings. Highlighting the role of the interaction network on uncertainty management in collective behaviour, with consequences for evolutionary biology, the findings also have implications for social and technological networks.
Augury is the ancient Roman habit of interpreting omens from the observed flight of birds. While I have no skills in that area, being a mere bird watcher, a wise augur would carefully study the signs termed “auguries,” or “take the auspices,” from the Latin “auspex” literally “one who looks at birds.” Depending upon the birds, the divine signals could be auspicious or inauspicious.
However, some “augures” who were politically motivated or corrupt could be bribed into manipulating dates to delay key events such as elections, the advancement of campaigns, the passage of laws, and the selection and appointment of powerful magistrates. It was believed that if an augur deliberately blundered, the gods would be so offended as to punish the entire society.
University of Michigan’s Greek and Roman historian, Professor David Potter explained in his book “Prophets and Emperors” that while “augures” interpreted and kept books containing records of past signs to guide skilled successors, they did not have the final say. It was ultimately the responsibility of the magistrate to execute decisions as to future actions. These legal seers were also expected to understand the basic interpretations, being called on often to take the auspices as they undertook public business.
I thought about the starlings’ theory and augures, reading reports of the perplexing number of Government Ministers in the official delegation headed by the Attorney General, and dispatched with a battery of expensive lawyers for the recent Caribbean Court of Justice’s (CCJ) final hearings on the contentious December 21, 2018 no-confidence vote and related cases in Trinidad, earlier this month.
Media reports said those travelling to Port-of-Spain included Indigenous Peoples’ Affairs Minister Sydney Allicock, Public Service Minister Tabitha Sarabo-Halley, Social Cohesion Minister Dr George Norton, Education Minister Nicolette Henry, Business Minister Haimraj Rajkumar, and Communities Minister Ronald Bulkan.
The panel of five judges led by the CCJ President, Justice Adrian Saunders concluded two days of hearings and is awaiting further submissions from the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), before announcing rulings, among others, related to the controversial appointment of the GECOM Chairman and the validity of the no-confidence motion narrowly passed 32-33 in the National Assembly, which required the Government to call elections by March 21 last.
These days, the signs, avian and otherwise do not look so auspicious for those who maintain the mathematical majority of our 66-member Parliament is 34-32. As Shakespeare’s Hamlet declared, “Not a whit, we defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come – the readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is’t to leave betimes, let be.”
ID remembers the Biblical warning not to use enchantments, nor practise augury. The Romans watched, too, for symbolic lightning, the spilling of salt and the pecking behaviour of sacred chickens
