An Iowa Garden

I read recently that a prominent animal behaviorist claimed once that birds never do anything for pleasure or joy; all of their activities are just blind instinct. Call me sappy, but on evenings like this I find his statement hard to believe. Today as the sun set in the west, the sky turned a deep blue, of infinite depth and clarity, and a huge congregation of snow white sea gulls from the nearby lake began migrating up our little valley, and as they reached the head of the valley, where our land is, they entered a large thermal, with the warm sun heating the bare ground, causing heated air to rise rapidly through the still-cool atmosphere. The birds started spiralling higher and higher in this updraft , as more and more gulls came up the valley and entered the lower level of the thermal and joined the chase. Soon there were about a hundred birds riding this circular escalator to the upper sky. The gulls were under-lit by the bright , setting sun, so that they were blindingly white against the deep blue background, soon becoming small, glowing white dots far up in the sky, until they finally reached the top of the thermal, then spilled out in all directions and disappeared. How can something so joyous to see not be enjoyed by the birds themselves?
Perhaps I am a little soft and sappy. Thirty years ago I was a fellow in gastroenterology at U.C. San Francisco. Each year the department would have a dinner meeting at a famous steak house downtown, where everyone would drink too much wine, smoke a big cigar, and listen to a prominent speaker brought in for the occasion. One year they had Francis Crick of DNA fame, who unknown to me at the time, became well known in later life as an anti-vitalist; that is, he felt that life had no special meaning. Well, another fellow and I probably (likely) had a little too much red wine, and were sitting in a corner booth listening to Crick's lecture, trying not to slide under the table on those big leather seats, while holding our big, fat cigars. Crick set us up by starting out his lecture talking about the beauty of nature and life, then outlined the mechanism of the double helix: one could look at the long double chain like two long hallways, and the side chains that are then attached to it are like rooms leading off the hallways. The side chains have a unique chemical bond to the helix that is thermodynamically very difficult to break, so rather irreversible, so it's as though , as you walk down the hallway and enter a room, you cannot exit again. It is inevitable that if enough time passes, that the right combination of molecules will become randomly and irreversibly attached, and what we call life will arise, and what we call beauty, joy, love, are all just predestined by these mindless chemical side chains; the blooming flower, the little child's smile, the butterfly's beauty, are just quirks of a chemical bond, and have no deeper meaning than say, the formation of water from hydrogen and oxygen. Well, by this time my friend and I were practically crying in the corner, our tears trying to put out our big fat cigars. This, of course, is just the reaction that Crick was trying to achieve; with us it was just child's play. So, don't give me any of this mechanical animal behavior stuff; I've paid my dues... leave me my gulls flying in ever higher circles in the evening sun just for the sheer joy of it.