Murmuration — a living starling flock you can scatter

press & hold the sky to send in a hawk

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slide to unlock

A real starling murmuration. Every bird steers by its ~7 nearest flock-mates — the topological rule from the empirical studies — so an escape ripples outward as an alarm wave nothing scripted.

Press & hold anywhere on the sky: a hawk dives to your finger and the nearest birds bolt. Let go and the flock reforms on its own.

Camera

Orbit

Time of day

Hour6:36 PM

The sun altitude re-lights the whole sky — sweep it into dusk for the classic silhouette, or past sunset to watch the stars come out.

Flock size

Birds1,400

The flock is a true-3D boid simulation on the topological neighbour model (Ballerini et al., PNAS 2008 — interaction ranges over a fixed number of neighbours, not a fixed distance). Birds never teleport, never stop, and turn at a finite rate; the shimmer is emergent. Hand-written for this repo — self-contained, no build, no dependencies.