Pigeons Set the Pace.

While the world tries to distract itself from multiple incipient and established human catastrophes with ephemera, clowns and circuses (politicians fitting quite neatly into the second category), the real business of the planet goes on.

Here in the antipodes winter is moribund, desperately trying to dredge up something cold and grey from its deathbed. But the passage of 
days is inexorable.             
      
                                                            

Trees and flowers are hushed with expectancy, looking around with eyebrows raised like a Premier League crowd waiting for their team to run out onto the pitch.                                                                  
Spring has been in training for a few weeks, doing wind sprints and push-ups and stretching exercises, primed for the main event.

Pigeons and plovers are scuttling around in circles in their invisible velodromes, the males with dogged persistence, the females fleeing with a mixture of anxiety and resignation, each knowing that the ritual is a metaphor for life itself, and can only end one way. 
Not for nothing has orgasm been called la petite mort.

Whales are heading north to labour in the warm waters of the Coral Sea, amusing themselves during the long boring voyage by terrorizing amateur fishermen in their little boats. They will commence the return journey to the krill-rich icy waters of the Southern Ocean after the ides of Spring, accompanied, and delayed by,their calves, whose behaviour is like nothing as much as toddlers in the supermarket.

All this sunshine, blue sky and rampant rooting are not without influence on the mood and behaviour of what passes for mankind in this country, as bodies emerge from woolen and synthetic winter carapaces, nipples erect with anticipation and the slight residual chill. 
Even old bastards are aware of a stirring in the loins. Trousers are giving way to shorts. Skinny legs and bony knees are appearing in public again. (Knee exposure is a big step for a man to take, but, like having sex with farm animals, only seems weird the first time you do it.) 

So here we go again. 

Animate beings are condemned to commit the same folly again and again. 
Self-interest defeated by the tyranny of the genes. 
It's probably just as well that logic is largely excluded from human behaviour.