It's all for the birds, really
Oct. 11th, 2010 10:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marinessA few weeks ago, I started to notice – let us call it twittering. (Not in the Twitter sense.) I assumed, not thinking much about it, that a couple of the local birds must have taken up residence in some nearby tree, and wanted to make sure that we knew about it, and by we, I mean the greater metropolitan area. Announcements were made morning, noon and evening. Sleep, these birds chirped loftily, is for other birds. I began to nourish a few faint hopes that perhaps – just perhaps – our local hawks would stop swooping down on fish and turn their attention to songbirds instead. (I've never seen them attack songbirds, but in my imagination it's possible.) We also have one or two bald eagles that haunt the area, and I figured they could start performing their national duty and start taking care of the noise in a natural sort of way.
The noise got, if anything, louder. Even the hawks started to avoid the area.
As it turns out, most of the noise is not from wild birds – I almost typed "natural" birds there, then realized that on this blog that phrasing would make you assume I was about to start chatting about some cyborg birds designed to go after demented killer squirrels, which while a fun idea is not the actual subject of this post – but rather some pet birds, placed out on the porch/balcony of the downstairs apartment, apparently because they are too noisy to be kept outside.
I haven't mentioned it, but the downstairs neighbors, like their predecessors, like to go just outside and chat loudly on their phones (in their defense, the cell phone reception inside the buildings here, and even just outside, is a bit wacky – I think we're right on the edge between two Sprint cell phone towers). And, sometimes, to add to the fun, they have guests over who smoke below. Smoke, you might recall, rises.
The end result is to remind me, yet again, that I never, ever want to live with birds again. I like birds when they are flying around the sky or dive bombing into lakes or quietly eating bugs next to zebra and antelope or waddling around on ice floes. I like them considerably less when they are inside the house, not just because of the noise, but also because, in my limited experience with housemates who kept pet parakeets, they have a tendency to dive bomb people during the tensest moments of television shows. While admittedly this rather added to the surreal feeling of Twin Peaks, it's not something I really recommend for viewing. On the other hand, I'm certain that the birds below are exactly what they seem - overly cheerful creatures too happy to be kept inside with humans.
The noise got, if anything, louder. Even the hawks started to avoid the area.
As it turns out, most of the noise is not from wild birds – I almost typed "natural" birds there, then realized that on this blog that phrasing would make you assume I was about to start chatting about some cyborg birds designed to go after demented killer squirrels, which while a fun idea is not the actual subject of this post – but rather some pet birds, placed out on the porch/balcony of the downstairs apartment, apparently because they are too noisy to be kept outside.
I haven't mentioned it, but the downstairs neighbors, like their predecessors, like to go just outside and chat loudly on their phones (in their defense, the cell phone reception inside the buildings here, and even just outside, is a bit wacky – I think we're right on the edge between two Sprint cell phone towers). And, sometimes, to add to the fun, they have guests over who smoke below. Smoke, you might recall, rises.
The end result is to remind me, yet again, that I never, ever want to live with birds again. I like birds when they are flying around the sky or dive bombing into lakes or quietly eating bugs next to zebra and antelope or waddling around on ice floes. I like them considerably less when they are inside the house, not just because of the noise, but also because, in my limited experience with housemates who kept pet parakeets, they have a tendency to dive bomb people during the tensest moments of television shows. While admittedly this rather added to the surreal feeling of Twin Peaks, it's not something I really recommend for viewing. On the other hand, I'm certain that the birds below are exactly what they seem - overly cheerful creatures too happy to be kept inside with humans.