What can birds see?

Crossing Llandaff Fields on my afternoon walk, I noticed in the distance a flock of about fifty birds flying in close knit formation, then settling on the ground to feed, before repeating the action, and then flying into the same tree. They were smaller and more agile in flight than the resident flock of pigeons. When I stood under the tree I could hear the characteristic chatter of starlings, and this was confirmed by a ground photo taken at fifty yards distance, in which the typical underside markings of a starling were visible. I noticed another flock of starlings coming out of another large tree a hundred yards away. I haven't seen so many starlings in one place for several years. Such a lovely sight.

I was examining the photo I'd taken when an lady walking her dog stopped to ask me what I thought they were, and the chatted about the variety of birds that are to be seen in the city centre parklands. She then told me a story about swallows flying low over muddy puddles, hunting insects, and how she and her partner were standing watching them when two birds came surprisingly close to them and hovered, as if inspecting their human observers for a short while. An unusual, wonderful moment, but when her partner died three months later, she started wondering if it had been some kind of omen. 

Do we ever consider, I wonder, that other creatures may be more aware of us at different levels, than we are of them. We tend to think of nothing more than the instinctive fight-flight reaction we share in common. It's already been observed that dogs with their acute senses react to the presence of cancer and maybe other ailments in human beings, and this has inspired researchers to take breath analysis to a deeper level as a diagnostic tool. It's amazing to how birds of prey react to movement, and the heat signature of a creature way below them on the ground, because of how their eyesight has evolved differently from ours. Can birds see things about us that we're incapable of noticing? There's so much potential for awe and wonder in this, that supernatural considerations seem unnecessary.

It's one year today since, I was examined and then operated upon by Dr Cotton at Quai Santé Medical Centre in Montreux to relieve the swelling in my right buttock caused by that perianal abscess I didn't know I had, as it hadn't been diagnosed in the two back-end examinations I'd undergone back home in the months beforehand. 

It's been a miserable and frustrating year, tied down in this miserable country by waiting for scans and then surgery, plagued by delays. Would the significant worsening of my condition last autumn until Christmas have been prevented by a course of antibiotics from day one? Would earlier referral for treatment by the district nurses have made a difference/ We'll never know. There's no point in looking back, even if the future of this course of treatment is still uncertain and gives nothing to look forward to yet. Maybe things will be clearer as a result of the third round of surgery in nine days from now. I hate not being able to make real future plans. I can't live off dreams.