This is a Hipmunk post from Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads

 Not too long ago, I posted about a murmuration of starlings in flight over Istanbul. The sight of it stopped me in my tracks nightly as clouds of birds circled their way around the city.  

Here’s another version of the remarkable phenomenon over Rome, with a peregrine falcon hunting for its dinner:

A friend sent me this footage today, shot by John Downer Productions and BBC as part of their EarthFlight series. What blew me away was how close the camera got to these birds. According to the Earthflight website:

To create its bird’s-eye view of the world Earthflight uses a host of extraordinary filming techniques including filming “imprinted” flocks from microlites, wild flocks filmed from model gliders and silent drones, full-sized helicopter with stabilised mounts and cameras on the backs of trained birds. Slow-motion techniques also reveal extraordinary detail such as swallows plucking feathers from the air.

Looking forward to the rest of these videos in the series. Beautiful stuff.

-Jodi