A group of starlings is called a murmuration, and it’s likely the single most famous collective noun tied to a specific visual spectacle in the natural world. The term describes the massive, swirling, shape-shifting flocks starlings form at dusk, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of birds moving as one fluid, pulsing mass across the sky.
The word comes from the soft, murmuring sound produced by countless wingbeats and calls all happening at once. Scientists believe murmurations form for predator defense, a fast-moving, unpredictable mass of birds is far harder for a hawk or falcon to target than an individual straggler, and each starling appears to track and react to the movements of just six or seven of its closest neighbors, which is enough to produce the stunning, coordinated waves seen from the ground.
Bonus fact: a single murmuration can contain over a million birds, and the resulting patterns have been studied by physicists interested in the same mathematical principles behind fluid dynamics and phase transitions.
Starlings are also occasionally described using more general bird terms like a flight or a chattering, but nothing captures the phenomenon quite like “murmuration.”
Related: Collective Nouns for Birds · What Is a Group of Starlings Called?