Waves and the speed of light

[Siegmund]

Yes, but only if you send instructions for the takeoff sequence ahead of time, not if you just tell them to take off as soon as their neighbor moves. (For instance, tell the first crow to take off 10 seconds [by his own watch] after a pulse travels through the wire beneath him, the crow 300,000 km to his left to take off 9 seconds after the pulse travels through, etc, and the crow 3 million km away to take off as soon as the pulse arrives.)

Also, remember that you, as an observer, won't be able to "see" anything happen faster than the speed of light; the way you will know the takeoff wave propagated faster than the speed of light is by discovering after the fact that several observers disagree on the order in which the birds took off. (If they take off simultaneously, each observer will believe the birds closest to himself took off first.)