Balmy evenings

The days are getting hotter now, afternoons are to be avoided, and the best time of day for sitting on the back porch is the evening, as the temperature falls slowly and a gentle zephyr begins to fan your cheek. It's a magical time, a time for thinking about nothing much; just allowing the twittering of the House Finches at the seed feeder to caress the edges of your mind.
And then I see a pair of House Sparrows in flagrante delicto, and my serenity is shattered. Not because they are doing what comes naturally to all God's creatures, but because of the sequence of events, und zwar:
She is perched on the bougainvillea, he is feeding voraciously at the seed feeder. Then he flies over to her, mounts her, exercises his conjugal rights in that here-I-come-there-I-went way that males have, and then returns to the seed feeder, leaving her to unruffle her feathers.
It all seemed a bit cavalier to me. A quick rumpipump and then he's back to his supper without so much as a backward glance or a how-was-it-for-you-darling.
I have heard of wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am, but when it comes to ungracious couplings, that male House Sparrow could give MaleChauvinistPiggery a bad name. Mind you, as far as I can tell, she enjoyed it. It's difficult to know, though, what goes in the mind of a lady sparrow - or, indeed, in the minds of ladies of any species meinetwegen.

PS I would like to acknowledge the copyright of the photo at the top of this article, although the pair of sparrows I witnessed did not, of course, have iStockPhoto scrawled all over their plumage.