We went out for a walk on Christmas day. It was gloriously quiet, even in the fairly dense part of London in which we live. What struck me was how many birds there were, hopping around openly and singing, even as late as 10am.
There are plenty of birds around us anyway -- we spend a significant amount of time watching and feeding them -- but it was a joy to see them just... owning the streets a little. Within an area of a few square meters, we could see something like 10 different species, and Merlin (the fantastic bird ID app from Cornell Labs) picked up 6 or so different songs all at the same time. We saw two woodpeckers, poking around one of the trees.
I wonder if birds effectively end up with 'festivals' aligned with significant human ones in a given region. Not things they are observing, as such, but odd days that come around only a few times a year where the human behaviour and movement patterns that shape where birds can go, and when, are so wildly different that an usual amount of space gets ceded to them.
You can see this a little on a week-to-week basis. The quiet of Sunday morning in parts of a city lets the birds range a little more freely, for a little longer. I've often wondered how sensitive they are to these patterns? They're certainly smart and aware enough, en masse, to identify them. Do they anticipate them? (terrible Band Aid music plays 'Do they know it's the week-end at alllll?')
And even if they can discern patterns on the scale of the week, can they anticipate the ones that come around only once a year? Do they struggle to sleep, the night before human Christmas, knowing that they have a whole day to romp around more-or-less as they please? Or does it come as a strange shock, every year, to find the streets so oddly unpeopled? Do they think they've taken over at last? (The crows probably do.)
Obviously it's absurd to posit the idea that crows might celebrate Christmas (though we have taken to bringing them a Yule feast of grapes and eggs). But the idea that they might be aware of the specialness of a day, even if it's one that exists as the shadow to something in the human calendar, actually makes a lot of sense to me.