Hectic lives for the smaller creatures — yet they manage to avoid collisions

Winter ‘murmuration’ season is under way: starlings wheel about in spectacular aerial ballet but don’t collide. This is how they avoid pile-ups...

Starlings, renowned mimics, incorporate the calls of other species in their songs. Picture: Larry Cummins

Immanuel Kant argued that time and space are part of the furniture of our minds. We structure our perceptions, and our understanding, using them; the world, as it in itself, transcends space-time and is unknowable. 

For Albert Einstein, time and space are relative. Each of us functions within a personal time-frame, flowing at its own rate; there can’t be absolute simultaneity. According to relativity theory, this applies to all moving objects, including animals.