“A couple years ago, while visiting my mom in the Valley Willamma, we went one evening to join several birders in watching the swifts return to their night roost in a large urban chimney. At this event, small flocks arrive one after the other until there are several thousand birds swirling high above the proposed roost. When all are ready, they suddenly cyclone down as one continuous body into the chimney. To us, it’s a magic scene. To the predator cooper’s hawk who was there the evening we visited, it’s a guaranteed meal.

The hawk waited patiently on the chimney rim, and when the swifts came down it simply reached into the cloud of birds and took one. Of course, the swifts know this is going to be the case… it is why they flock so largely to enter the roost in the first place, and it is at least half of the reason why they all sleep together. When faced with a predator, there is relative individual safety in numbers. In the air, the large cloud formed of swirling swifts can and does make it more difficult for a potential killer to pick out any individual to pursue.

But that doesn’t mean the hawks won’t succeed in their endeavors. The primary benefit of the flock is not for the group as a whole to escape danger, but to increase the odds of survival for any given individual. This is a practice shared among many social prey animals – from small birds, to fish, to large ungulates like elk and cattle. Oh… and by the way, this strategy is also part of our human genetic repertoire. Our ancestors must have employed it when pursued by our ancient predators. And still today, we continue to use the “passive herd” as a response pattern when confronting some forms of danger. The problem is, we seem to have forgotten that doing so does not change the predator-prey relationship AT ALL, and so we feel accomplished in the herding activity itself because our intuition tells us that it can accomplish something, yet we are frustrated when the fundamental relationship with the predators we are trying to change remains.

In effect, we are failing to understand what this call to collectivity is really about, how it functions, and to what purposes it may or may not be useful. Like the cooper’s hawk waiting on the chimney ledge, our herding makes it very easy for the predators to find us, and to employ their own time-honored strategies that take our collectivity and its passivity into account for an assured meal.

Now, if the swifts had slightly adjusted their approach and violently mobbed the waiting hawk before entering the chimney, the outcome for that evening might have changed. So that is one possibility that the flockers might keep in mind, for how to utilize the power of collectivity in group defense, rather than just for increasing an individual’s odds. But there are many other non-violent means to deal with the situation as well. We just need to reach into our inheritance and employ the strategies we’ve learned for effectively dealing with the particular situation at hand. Or we can employ the wrong strategy over, and over, and over again, and change nothing at all. — Ryan HeavyHead