On a winter day not long ago, my wife and I were out walking. As we walked by a couple of acres covered by scrub brush and trees, a flock of small birds of a non-descript brown color alighted from a near-by tree. They went aloft together as by a signal, though we heard none. And they winged their way in a pattern that was as if choreographed to keep constant the distances among them. This choreography produced a kind of waving undulation, as the flock seemed to be deciding together just where they were going and which of them fit where in the overall formation. In a split second, the decision to leave the tree near us seemed to be amended by a decision to re-position the flock in two other trees, bare in their winter way, on the far side of the lot. The single flock seamlessly diverged into two components, and each component feathered itself into a splay of individual birds that distributed themselves evenly among the branches of each tree.

The flock was now well-settled in its new location, a collective dance of improvised flight that took, altogether, perhaps two seconds.

I have always been entranced by the beauty in the patterns of the flights of flocks of birds. Not so much the V’s formed by ducks and geese in their migrations, with their more rigid and military-style maintenance of formation. Rather my greatest delight is in those flocks that seem to make it up as they go along, on the wing, one might say. The way they turn and wheel, and flash one way and all in an instant reconsider as if with one collective mind, and sweep off in another way, the sun playing off the different sides of their bodies as if the birds were one brilliant rooting section in a football crowd shifting the colored cards they hold up to change their show to the admiring crowd.

To the viewer, the patterns being displayed are themselves something of great beauty. The patterns we see, however, are manifestations of patterns unseen. One can surmise what must be built into the birds themselves to enable these flocks to perform so magnificent a dance.

When those birds took off together, I am willing to bet that it was just a few who decided that it was time to relocate, and that in a tiny fraction of a second, the rest of the flock took the cue and made it look like something the group had been planning for weeks, and rehearsing like a “Drum Line” marching band.

There’s some high-performance response pattern, I assume, wired into their brains, which enables them to make such instantaneous collective decisions. Over the millions of years of millions of generations creating this species of birds, the capacity for precision flying that would put the Blue Angels to shame has doubtless been an important component of these birds’ adaptive strategy.

How else could they execute, so flawlessly, such commands as “maintain coherence combined with optimum spacing– no collisions, no solos”? In so little time that the mere human eye cannot see any pause or delay at all, the change of direction of one bird translates into an instantaneous corresponding change of those nearby and thus of the whole flock. (Instantaneous-looking at least in a small flock like the one in the winter field here in New Mexico. I’ve seen huge flocks –for example, in the autumn skies of Maryland and Virginia– wheel and turn, albeit with a slower undulation, as the idea “let’s shift” spreads across a vast space of hundreds or thousands of birds.)

Evolution has created in these birds –in the wiring of the system in the birds that embraces the steps from perception to alteration of their course in flight– a set of deep patterns, perhaps an algorithm or set of rules, that translate into beauty, the poetry in motion they reveal as flocks in flight.

There are eight million stories of Wholeness and patterns in the structure of life. This has been one of them.*

*(Note to those born less than fifty years ago: that’s a play on the recurrent final line in an old TV show, “The Naked City.”)