Rooks must be the jolliest of all birds. On Sunday, driving northwards through Meath, there were flocks of them to be seen in the air every mile or so, chuckling, you could swear, at the fine wind that blew them upwards and sidewards, downwards, and all the time the birds, ace fliers, were making the best of what the God of the winds sent them. For, even on a still day, they are capable of remarkable aerobatics. But this wind added to their sport. Gilbert White of Selbourne in southern England, writing 200 years ago of the same birds, noticed their similar activities in autumn especially: "Just before dusk they return in long strings from the foraging of the day, and rendezvous by thousands over Selbourne Down, where they wheel around in the air and sport and dive in a playful manner, all the while exerting their voices, and making a loud cawing, which, being blended and softened by the distance that we at the village below them are, becomes a confused noise or chiding: or rather a pleasing murmur . . . and not unlike the cry of a pack of hounds in hollow, echoing woods, or the rushing of the wind in tall trees, or the tumbling tide upon a pebble shore."
Sunday's aerobatics bore no comparison to the huge flocks of close-formation-flying of starlings which you often see. Just bustling, soaring, gliding, black birds, each one doing his or her own thing. The study of birds is fashionable just now. What with Hubert Reeves the astronomer, in his recent metaphysical work Birds, Marvellous Birds reminding us, or introducing us to the fact that birds, in many things are, and have long been ahead of us humans.
And then, in every day terms, we have David Attenborough bringing birds and animal life to our TV screens with commentary of such a confidential, assured manner that we are drawn into a circle. He feels that human and animal worlds, at least for city-dwelling Westerners, had become separate realms - and he is out there, making contact with the aliens on our behalf. "And that's why people feed birds," he says, because "they feel they are accepted by something other than a human, which is a profound thing." Well.