10th January ‘11  (taken from my personal journal…)

I was listening to a flock of seagulls circling above the garden yesterday and it seemed that as their ‘language’ is apparently so limited (as humans understand it), their vocal noises can’t be much more than the ‘small talk’ we humans employ.

By its nature, small talk is not really informative, therefore it seems that it must be performing some other function.
The obvious bandwagon to jump onto is to assume that it is for social bonding purposes. And social bonding in its natural sense would mean that the accepted individual’s making and partaking in small talk are seen as a suitably good ‘investments’ by the common consciousness of the group mind to look after and to help protect.

In numbers, there is safety.

So, among social animals, it seems that they too have their small talk, it’s just that they don’t seem to have the ‘big’ talk that humans use… but perhaps we are simply ignorant…