Richard Barnes is a photographer who captured the fascinating flight-flocks of European starlings. In the US, starlings are an invasive species, a bird-weed that is remarkably successful. Barnes shot this series of photos -- called Murmur -- in a suburb of Rome, where huge flocks gather each spring.
I've sometimes seen smaller cloudlike formations of birds like these in the Bay Area, especially when I used to cross the Dumbarton Bridge daily. I don't know if those birds were starlings or swifts or swallows or what, but I'd practically drive off the highway watching the morphing patterns, as if they were connected to an unseen sheet and carried away by the wind.
(from the always excellent Very Short List.)
