Scenes · Study 091
Birds on Wires
Twenty-two small birds perch on sagging power lines at dusk. Bring your pointer close and they take off, circle, and settle somewhere new.
What you're looking at
Each bird is in one of three states. Perched birds sit on a wire and occasionally shuffle sideways. A bird that is startled, by the pointer or by nothing at all, flies off on flapping wings for a few seconds. Then it picks a free spot on a random wire and glides back to it.
The idea behind it
Birds can sit on a live wire because electricity only flows through a body when there is a voltage difference across it. Both feet are on the same conductor at the same voltage, so almost no current takes the detour through the bird. The even spacing along a wire is real behaviour too: each bird keeps just out of pecking range of its neighbours.
Try this
Move the pointer along the wires to flush the birds. Wait a few seconds and they come back.
