DO LORIKEETS SYNCHRONISE WING-BEATS?

I think so. However, one’s senses are so easily fooled under certain circumstances, especially on the balcony of the Noosa Surf-Lifesaving Club on a beautiful beery late-afternoon.

I was facing landward, having had my fill of the excoriating ocean, my eyes requiring the restful green of the hill behind Hastings Street.

The sun was setting on the burned beach-goers, the traffic grinding slowly on the roundabout below, and against a technicolor violet sky the massive eucalypts near my perch swarmed with raucous lorikeets; their evening ritual preparatory to the nightly roost.

Perfectly relaxed by the ale, the day in the surf, and the exquisite sensation of a clean shirt on salty skin, I allowed my mind to examine in focused clarity the behaviour of the lorikeets, where it seemed something strangely hallucinogenic was happening.

The large noisy flock was performing its short evening ritual; settling briefly within the high branches before taking-off en-mass to circle the tree and the sky at tremendous speed.

It was as the flock raced past between my perch and theirs, not more than fifty metres away, that a strange flickering affected my vision, as if eyesight were briefly malfunctioning: perhaps the alcohol, the ocean exertions, the savage ultra-violet.

Now curious and particularly focused, I concentrated on the flock as its circuit passed: same weird effect. Not my eyes, then, but the flock itself, which for a brief second seemed to flicker as it passed me. As if the frame of a film became momentarily jerked.

As the circuits passed I realised what caused the phenomenon.

The flock was behaving in a way, like one unit. As shoals of fish do mysteriously; a million fish with one body, one brain.

Once airbourne and assembled, the lorikeets assumed one personality in their flock; completely synchronised, each wingbeat and manoevre mirrored in each bird simultaneously.

As the flock passed me, and this is the tricky part, every bird raised and lowered its wings as one. Every wing went up, then down. A thousand tightly-packed birds as one. The banked angle of turn emphasised the illusion of a flickering, faulty image, impossible, because of speed of the wingbeats, to reconcile in a limited human brain, which perceived a juddering image.

Perhaps it was just me, just my perception. I have had the phenomenon repeated a few times; on each occasion wishing for a slow-motion camera to resolve the effect.

Ain’t Life wonderful?