http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81wFZavdhPU&feature=player_embedded
I’ve posted a link to one of these movies before, I think it was the “Learn from the Best” series on Taijiquestion. But I was checking My Yahoo this morning and one of the features or newsbits they had posted was this link [above] about the amazing cloud of 300,000 birds.
Years ago I started paying attention to the little black birds in my local area. I would be driving to or from work — or just standing outside somewhere — and see these clouds of maybe 50, 100, or 200 birds doing their group shapeshifting thing in mid-air. Because I was trying to learn something about mind intention in taiji, I watched the birds with grateful interest since they seemed to be able to move in a way that should make any taiji player jealous, whether we’re talking Chen, Yang, Wu, Sun or some other style.
Finally I got curious enough to do a little research and I learned a bit about how these pea-brained creatures could manage maneuvers that would leave the best military corps crying for mama. One article explained that it’s not necessary for each bird to know what all the others are doing; and though there are leader birds and follower birds in any flock, obviously there wasn’t one bird-general (or Bird Colonel, ha-ha) orchestrating the wildly changing moves of the living cloud.
No, it seems that all that’s needed is for each bird to be aware of what his few immediate neighbors are doing. I think they even had figured out the number, like each bird knows what the 5 or 7 birds nearest are doing at any given moment. This local intelligence, which all the birds possessed through evolutionary development, meant that huge swarms of birds could travel as storm-tossed waves, dominating the land and sky where they choose. All without collisions and traffic jams (to use an automobile allusion); all without disconnection, stiffness, and ding (to use a taiji allusion).
I’m glad to have these little teaching groups in my area and for some years now, just about any time I move my body, I continue to gain some benefit from having seen what can be done with a trained mind control of yin and yang.
