These incredible photos reveal split-second moments of one of the most mysterious natural phenomena in the sky

This might look like an egregiously misplaced school of fish, but it's actually an example of what ornithologists (bird experts) call a murmuration:

It's a flock of hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of tiny song birds called starlings. But exactly how these swarms decide to move and when with such a fluid motion is a complete mystery.

Within a murmuration, starlings are constantly on the move, so the shape is always changing.

But some photographers managed to capture some incredible, split-second moments of these flowing flocks that look strikingly similar to common shapes like a gigantic smoking pipe, goose, and sting ray. Check them out below: