Strength in Numbers
In these dire times, the wisdom of wildlife encourages us to stick together.
BY TRACY BASILEMARCH 8, 2025Since January 21, I’ve been jumping in and out of two worlds: my life putting together this website about the animals of Turtle Island, and being glued to the news, following writers like historian Heather Cox Richardson and climate author Rebecca Solnit. I’m not sure how to go about my everyday life and stay informed. It’s exhausting. Then I read Rebecca Solnit’s essay from early February, “Fighting for justice doesn’t have to be a big dramatic act. It can be small” in the Guardian and it offered an unexpected source for strength — safety in numbers — following the examples of animals. She says, “…it’s important to not limit our sense of what resistance looks like” and she brings home the point by describing little-known facts about wild animal behavior:
“I learned something new about animal behavior last week, and it seems really timely. A reindeer cyclone is when a herd of reindeer facing a predator put the calves in the center and whirl around fast, making it difficult to impossible for the predator to pick off one reindeer. The more of us who speak up the harder it will be to persecute any single person who says trans rights are human rights or what’s being done to immigrants is terrorism. It’s not the only example from the animals. When threatened, musk oxen likewise circle up, facing outward with their huge horns, calves again in the middle of the ring.
A murmuration of starlings forms the shape of a bird over Lough Ennell, Ireland, James Crombie“Some say that murmurations – those beautiful flights of thousands of starlings undulating and pulsating as they whirl through the sky together – create flocks that are hard for predators to attack. There’s safety in numbers, which is why a lot of prey animals move in herds and flocks and schools. For those who dissent from what this new administration intends to do, we may sometimes be able to surround an Ice van or march by the thousands, but every time we dissent we make room for others to dissent. Courage, like fear, is contagious. For a lot of us, right now, we get to choose, and what we choose has an impact on what others choose.”
There are lots more examples of courageous acts of unity from the animal kingdom. Here’s a few:
Like the reindeer, when a buffalo falls from being shot, those nearby gather round into a circle and run around in a circle attempting to help the fallen get up and get to safety.
Also, when the matriarch of a herd decides to take a different direction, more than half of the herd will follow and then that group stops and waits for the remaining half to catch up. No one gets left behind.
Crows flock together at night to sleep in communal groups called roosts. Scientists speculate that their large numbers offer protection from predators such as owls.
Tunas and smaller fish such as sardines, anchovies, and herrings swim in large, tightly packed schools. Their swimming confuses sharks trying to pick out a single target. If they suddenly need to reverse or make a rapid turn because they feel threatened, the transition from leaders to followers is fluid and can occur in a split second.
These traits have evolved over vast stretches of time. They are a part of evolutionary history and a part of our history, too.
You can read Solnit’s whole essay here.
Notes: