Sunday morning early.

 Sunday morning early.   Bright sunshine but slightly fresher air.   According to my carer we have had storms all round us - Thirsk, Coverdale - without anything other than flashes of lightning lighting up the sky and distant rumbles of thunder  for us to bother about.

Now just a still, sunny, warm morning with a patchy sky.  Sitting here in the window of the computer room with the window wide open, nothing to disturb but the constant sound of rooks - caw, caw - in the field behind my garden.

I am constantly fascinated by the behaviour of birds.   Rooks are one of my favourites.   As regular readers will be aware, I look forward once the days get shorter to watching them fly over every morning at dawn in their thousands - and then return at dusk to gather in the huge ash tree in the field and on the grass beneath it - their roost before flying off to bed.

But they have begun to spend their whole day in and around the field behind my bungalow - not all of them of course but perhaps a  couple of hundred.  They seem to spend their whole day poking about in  the grass for food, flying round making a noise,sitting around in the ash tree and generally making a bit of a nuisance of themselves.  You can go off people you know but me and rooks have a bond which can't be broken even if they do drive me mad if I sit out on the patio.

And looking out over the dale to East Witton Fell while eating my breakfast I watched a group of about a dozen birds (too far away to say what they were) fly round and round, maybe half a dozen times in a sort of loop.   Questions come to mind:  they stay together as they fly round the same course for about ten minutes - all turning at the same time, all flying at the same speed.  What are they doing?  What is motivating them to do that and why?   When I think of the Red Arrows Team, they spend their lives practising their skills and earn huge respect throughout the world for their ability.   Birds do it naturally.   And we think we are clever.

Already skeins of geese are flying over in their accurate V formation - heading West as they pass my window- changing 'leader' now and again I understand.  We have been clever enough to know where they are going now but do we know how they know?   What metaphorical 'clock' tells them 'come on chaps, time to move before that horrible British winter weather arrives'.   And do they just 'follow their beaks'?  Or do they know exactly where they are going and how to get there?

That swallow (or eventually son of swallow and grandson of swallow) that arrived every year at the farm, around the middle of April, to sit on the wire by the barn and wait for his missus to arrive and join him in repairing and re-lining last years nest in the far corner of the barn, above where the sheepdog slept.   Have they stayed together all year as Mr and Mrs?   If so, why didn't they arrive together?  Did she stop off somewhere to visit distant relatives?

I've not taken particular interest before, I have just accepted that it was how it was.   But now as  I have plenty of time to 'Stand and Stare' as WH Davies would have us believe he did (sit and stare in my case) I am hungry for information.

All I can say is - why do we think we are so clever, why we think we are superior to all over living things -  and what gives us the right to mistreat animals and birds - to enslave them into working for us - camels,mules, elephants (not always treated well), to keep birds in cages to 'prettify our dwellings' or to carry around in cages so that we can hear them sing? (although what many of them have to sing about I really do wonder).

Am I going dotty in my antiquity or do others feel the same?   We speak disparagingly of folk being 'bird-brained' - sometimes I think we ought to take that as a complinent when|I see the behaviour of some of my own species.