On day three of my return from an exhausting albeit incredible trip to Rome and Berlin over Christmas and New Years and I'm still delirious with jet-lag and surprised by the occasional hot flashes it affords. With both of us being as busy as a two dollar hooker, the man and I truly indulged in some much needed quality time together and fell more in love than ever. In Rome we shared raucous laughter and smiles that made our faces ache over delicious meals of margarita pizza, caprese salads, cacio e pepe pasta, all accompanied by a sea of red wine and finished off with double scoops of gelato.
Even in the winter rain, the ancient city still expels its enchanting history as the ruins echo past civilizations and one can't help but feel romantic. However, the highlight of the trip was not a meal, a museum or an ornately decorated church but rather an experience we got to observe at dusk on the night we were departing to Berlin. While approaching the Tiber river to cross Ponte Giuseppe Mazzini to meet a cab back at our hotel, we noticed a group birds flying overhead. It took us a few moments to realize that this just wasn't a flock of birds flying by but rather a swarming, billowing, intertwining cloud of birds, performing an intricate dance right above our heads. In awe we stood for 20 minutes with our eyes gazing skywards, mouths agape in disbelief. When we finally realized the time, we had to rush back to our hotel but as we walked, jittery with excitement at what we just witnessed, we noticed another cloud of birds performing the same dance above another bridge in the distance.
I vowed to research this spectacle of wildlife when we returned to the states and found that the dancing birds were starlings and what they were doing was called a 'murmuration' and is a basic instinct for survival--safety in numbers. The murmuration occurs as the birds return from an afternoon of foraging and as their numbers continue to grow so does the cloud. No one bird wants to be the outsider, vulnerable to predators so each bird tries to fly as close as they can to their neighbor, copying changes in speed and direction and even the smallest deviation in one bird will be magnified by those around it and distort the formation of the entire cloud.
How lucky were we to experience such a phenomenon!!
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