Who is leading the group? What’s their goal in making the formation? Are they hunting together?
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For little songbirds like that there is no permanent leader, they’re just naturally gregarious as a predator defense. It’s hard to chase down a single bird in a whirling tornado of identical birds, and predators get bamboozled.
They’re not hunting, most of their diet is seeds and small bugs they grab off the ground.
How they actually manage to swirl around in a big cloud without colliding has been the subject of a lot of research and modeling over the years. Each bird is eyeballing a few others in flight and adjusting to maintain position compared to them.
How they decide which way to whip the whole cloud is a more democratic process, with individuals near the edges picking a direction and the rest following whichever direction has more birds.
Sometimes you’ll see a particularly indecisive flock buzz about in place for a while because they can’t decide which way they want to go, or leave a few stubborn stragglers that don’t feel like going that way yet.
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