Bird behaviour (London)

I was house sitting in south London, in a leafy private road with two-storey four-bedroom detached houses surrounded by trees.

    One day in January, the weather got quite squally.

    On the bare rooftop of the house (to the left) across the road was an upright, grey, heron-like shape next to the 2ft-high chimney pot: taller than it, sitting very still, slightly hunched. Not quite believing my eyes (why would a bird sit out there, unsheltered, in the wind and rain?), I watched it for a long time, waiting for some movement, to check that it was really a bird rather than something bird-like erected on the roof that I hadn’t noticed before. It didn't move for quite a while, and I gave up. When I went back later to the window and looked out, the heron shape had gone. So, it had indeed been a bird. With so many trees around for it to hide in, it was obviously up there to be lashed by the wind and the rain, as there was nothing else on this rooftop for it to experience. 

    (I was judging that heron with my own human standards: why sit out there in the wind and rain? Reminds me of once, after work in Taipei, when colleague Peggy walked me to the street a few blocks away from the Conoco office to catch my bus home. It was drizzling. When Peggy was going to leave me at my stop, I said I’d like to walk on for a bit more. Peggy immediately became concerned, “Would you like to talk about it?” It seems that if someone wants to walk in the rain alone, it must be because they have something on their mind. That's how films and stories present it.) 

    A few hundred yards away, beyond the other house opposite (to the right), the tops of the copse of a dozen 100ft(?)-tall fir trees were swaying wildly, as the rain pelted down. 

    I love watching the swaying of tree tops (among other things) — used to spend most of the day at home childminding the two daughters on school holiday when I was staying with an ex-schoolmate in Sydney, watching the tops of the eucalyptus trees a few hundred yards away swaying, imagining a Heidi sort of scene, although I didn’t have the sound effects. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidi) 

    I then noticed that a huge flock of birds (at least 30, if not 50) were flying around the top of these fir trees and actually landing on the upper branches, even though the wind was strong and it was raining quite heavily. The gusty wind meant they didn’t always get a firm foothold, if at all, with the tree tops swaying so violently, but they kept returning. Shaken off balance, they’d have another go at landing and hanging on, again and again and again, for ages and ages. 

    One would’ve thought that they’d go and hide under some big tree somewhere out of the wind and rain, so it must mean that they were actually doing it on purpose, treating it as a game: to see if they could land, and how long they’d stay on the branches before being shaken off. Or perhaps merely to land and experience the swaying as entertainment, like humans enjoying a roller-coaster ride.

    Interesting behaviour. 

(London, UK, 2023)