Really only two species of Passerine birds in North America that will
flock like that: Starlings and Red-Wined Blackbirds. Grackles will do that
but I've never seen anywhere like the numbers you describe.
Charlie
On Thu, Sep 15, 2016 at 10:40 AM, Ken Norton <ken@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Not sure what they are. Sparrows? Who knows. I'm not a bird guy. But
> this morning as I let the dog out for her morning constitutional, a
> flock of birds lit off from the trees a block away and thereabouts and
> flew past our house. While I'm not the best at estimating crowd
> numbers, what I did was counted in a segment and started multiplying
> to get a larger segment then estimated the number of those segments.
>
> Conservatively, there were about 50 thousand birds that flew past the
> house. It took about five minutes for the main flock to pass by and
> the stragglers were still still going past five minutes later. Another
> estimate based on time-density-frequency puts the flock at closer to
> 60 thousand birds. I estimate 200 birds per second, times five
> minutes. The density and speed was consistent throughout the main
> ascension.
>
> So, whatever they were, they had our dog's attention as they flew
> past. I think she was smart enough to figure that barking at one or
> two birds was safe, but that crowd warranted keeping her mouth shut in
> case they all decided to attack.
>
> AG
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