Who is leading the group? What’s their goal in making the formation? Are they hunting together?
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We think that birds which flock, like fish that school, do it because of the “safety in numbers” idea. Predators have trouble targeting a specific individual when the mass moves around like that.
Why and how flocks and schools behave like the do is a tougher question to answer. This sort of group action is called “emergent behavior”, which is a pair of big words saying that the group acts like a single individual for some odd reasons we don’t quite understand.
Somehow, the group makes decisions and each individual responds in kind to that group decision. A controlled chaos of sorts.
Really quite beautiful to watch but the how of it is not something we humans can agree on. They do it somehow. Humans on a crowded street do the same thing.
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