Are these birds using telepathy?

Have you ever seen a flock of birds or a school of fish all moving together in almost perfect synchrony and wondered – how do they do that? 

This video of a flock of starlings, called a murmuration, returns just before sunset to roost overnight in Rome.  They seem to be flying as if they have one collective mind.

A study, measuring the speed and direction of individual birds, showed the birds mimicked the movements of a few of their close neighbours.  This would be expected.  The surprise was that tens of thousands of birds almost one kilometre apart and unable to see each other also moved in the same direction at the same speed. 

The order in the group could be top down from a leader at the front or it could be bottom up coming from birds at the back or sides of the group.  Top- down organization helped the group to fly in formation but danger and avoidance from a predator required    information from birds anywhere in the group. The information seemed to spread rapidly right across the entire flock, so they all changed speed and direction at the same time.

Abraham Liboff, a physicist and pioneer of research into the magnetic sense of animals proposed that birds were picking up magnetic cues from their neighbours.   He thought the bird’s magnetic field could extend outwards far enough to reach one flying alongside.  Instead, it is also possible that the birds were sharing electromagnetic  information from their individual brains to form a collective mind across the whole group. 

Not only birds but the brainwaves of other animals such as schools of fish, herds of grazing animals, swarms of insects and humans clapping in rhythm at concerts could also be linked through extremely low electromagnetic radiation or ELF waves to form a collective consciousness

Ref.  Cavagna a et al. 2010.  “Scale-free correlations in starling flocks” PNAS 107: (26) 11865-11870

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1005766107

Liboff A.R. 2016 “The Electromagnetic basis of social interactions” Electrtomagnetic Biology and Medicine 36☹2) 177-181