Joy and haplessness

We’ve a family of twenty or so sparrows the branches of whose home-base protect our hedgehog hut. I’m enthralled by their antics most days and when I try to understand their drive and flight and play I come back almost always to one word – joy. Why else do they engage in choral twittering from dawn ’til dusk? Or flap their tiny wings to raise up a dust-bath for twenty in the heart of our kitchen garden? Yes: I’m captivated by their joy. And by hedgehog haplessness which perhaps amounts to the same thing, but appears ponderous. An earthenware water bowl is carefully seated in a flower bed near Hedgehog Hall. Every evening at dusk one or two shy souls partake of the tucker sprinkled close to the bowl, and then they drink, daintily tipping the bowl to aid their convenience. Clever little chaps. Why then do they always head home via the same route – up, into, through, spilling, up and over the other side of the bowl? Is this haplessness, or bathtime – or joy? Strange creatures, those humans, they’re all probably thinking. They heat their water, and then get into it, and wallow in it – indoors! What’s that all about then?