Rules for assembling a flock

Pigeons are provisional creatures. From their adopted urban habitats to their ever-changing ‘home-from-home’ but perhaps most provisional of all – their flocking. When flying, the flock is assembled (provisionally) based on a series of rules. These rules are not hierarchical but instead hold the flock in a self-organised criticality, a fragile interdependence which is vulnerable to change and collapse.(image: terraswarm, Brooklyn Pigeon Project) The flock is constantly reconfigured by the  movement of the birds at its fringes, who in a process known as peeling, become detached from the main body. These detachments provide and new and changing focus and gravitational centre for the flock; a community reassembled by a fluctuating set of circumstances.