Biking back to my rented cottage from CERN one autumn evening, having descended into the underworld of matter for a visit to the world’s largest high-energy particle collider, a sight stopped me up short on the shore of Lake Geneva: In the orange sky over the orange water, myriad particles were swarming in unison without colliding. Except they were not particles — they were birds. Thousands of them. A murmuration of starlings — swarm intelligence at its most majestic, emergence incarnate, a living reminder that the universe is “nothing but a vast, self-organizing, complex system, the emergent properties of which are… everything.”

The majesty and mystery of murmurations come alive with uncommon beauty in We Are Starlings: Inside the Mesmerizing Magic of a Murmuration (public library) by writers Donna Jo Napoli and Robert Furrow, illustrated by artist Marc Martin, who also brought us the wondrous A Stone Is a Story.

As a murmuration of starlings takes flight against a breathtaking watercolor sky, the story is told from the perspective of the birds — an antidote to our anthropocentric view of the natural world, which Rachel Carson pioneered nearly a century ago with her revolutionary writings about the sea.

Soft yet striking, the illustrations play masterfully with our sense of scale — we zoom out and out from closeups of the flock to the full sweep of the murmuration, then back to the scale of the feathered particle that is the individual bird.

A four-page gatefold wings the book with a sense of the astonishing grandeur of these small, fragile creatures constellating something immense and powerful, greater than the sum of its parts — one of the living wonders of this Earth.

Couple We Are Starlings with the lovely animated poem “Murmuration,” then revisit other kindred illustrated celebrations of the natural world: The Forest, Dawn, What Is a River, and The Blue Hour.