For a few days now I have witnessed a strange phenomenon. At first, I only noticed it in a patchy fashion, but as the days go by a pattern is emerging here. There is outside my window, on the roof of a building across from mine, a band of birds. They perch there sometimes, but they seem every evening to engage in aeronautical acrobatics. I sometimes see a man there - the first day, he seemed to be shooing them off. Now I am not so sure.

The birds appear to have a leader, who lands on the building first, and a few seconds later all the birds land, neatly lined up. When they take off again, they continue to circle the building in a rather narrow circumference - a small circle in the sky. They do a few rounds and continue to increase in speed, often warping the circle into an ellipse.

The amazing thing is that although they are not robotically perfect - the shapes they make are natural and organic - they have an almost poetic perfection to their movements. They become a furious cyclone of birds, spinning, diving, and swooping. I wonder how they are so synchronized. I can only imagine if it were a flock of humans at least one incidence of cracked skulls.

Anyway, I will continue to see if they appear each night - black shadows on an orange, dusky sky. Whether they are trained or untrained, it is magic.