Monday, March 26, 2007

nature calls

When we first moved out to New York one of the things that startled me was that the birds sounded different. Bird calls. You don't really think of them as something to get nostalgic about. But different birds, indeed, do make different sounds and the birds here are different birds from there.

After getting over the homesickness factor, the chirping has become what chirping is: just some background noise; a pleasant but subtle reminder that Spring is here. Except for one bird. He is the one who wakes me up in the morning. He remindes me of a car alarm.
But a car alarm that I find charming. Which, of course, no real car alarm would induce me, could induce me to feel that way, and this is how I know I am truly listening to a bird.

However, when I first became aware of this bird, I was convinced he was simply imitating what I had heard from a car a street over the night before. But it's pleasant to lie in bed in the morning and listen for a few minutes (while trying to figure out how to recreate it for a blog post, or something). Twooouuuut. Twoooouuut. Tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet. Twooouuut. Twooouuut. Tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet. Well, that's my attempt at an onomatopoeic recreation. My bird is really much more nuanced than that. Which is how it should be.

1 comment:

  1. I would love to hear a verbal recreation of that. We had a woodpecker the other morning that sounded like a light-duty jackhammer. That was cool.

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