The Birds

I'm got up early this morning to enjoy a few minutes of quiet house before the kids get up and we work on our projects for the Tunbridge Fair, which starts on Thursday.

And the house is quiet, but the farm is a fucking riot of bird noise.

There is Buster the Rooster, whose ninety-decibel crow is only slightly muted by the walls of the heifer barn. There is the new little rooster, christened Mr. Feather by Harley, who hatched from some eggs we incubated this spring. He is Buster's son and likely on his way to a new level of rooster operatics, but he's just starting with his first raspy crows this week. I think it's hard for a rooster to be outcrowed, and Mr. Feather answers every one of Buster's calls and then practices in between.

The roosters are making a lot of noise, but the crazy loudness is coming from the field in front of the house. There are maybe a thousand birds, maybe more, flying and cawing. At first I thought maybe there was a migration going by, but migratory birds usually stay higher than this and they usually save their energy for flying, emitting only the occasional honk, chirp or quack. These birds are flying in groups, but they're just flying back and forth across the field, from the trees on one side to the trees on the other. Sometimes the whole group does a swoop up high or down low, but mostly they are just zooming back and forth, sometimes running their groups right through each other, like a bird game of Chicken, except that no self-respecting bird would give the name, "Chicken," any place in a game of fancy flying and mock aerial combat.

The birds are definitely cawing, but they aren't big enough to be crows. They don't look big enough to be making such a deep noise. They look about the size of grackles, but I didn't think grackles did the flock thing until I just looked it up on Wikipedia and learned that joining up in a big gang and making a boatload of noise is what grackles do in the fall. What fun. Well, if it's grackles, that explains a lot. Grackles are sort of fun to watch, once you get over the part where they are nesting in the house, waking the baby with their 700 tph (trips per hour) nest making and baby-bird feeding, and filling the soffits with their toxic bird shit.

I get great comfort, when I am lying in bed desperate for twenty more minutes of sleep or sitting at the computer desperate for twenty minutes of focused work, that the world is full of people, stacked up in apartments and offices, who regularly sleep and work through traffic, sirens and maybe even the occasional human riot. I should be able to sleep through a few hundred rooster calls or work through a game of grackle Red Rover outside my door. Maybe it's different with birds, or maybe I'm just hardwired to take their calling personally. If Buster is crowing at 4:15 and Earl is already gone to the barn, I think, "Up with the rooster. Up with the rooster. I'd be a more productive person if I was up with the rooster." If a flock of geese fly over, on perfect seasonal schedule, I fret over all the things I haven't done to get ready for winter. The grackles don't move me to self improvement, but they do piss me off with all their raucous, unmannered fun.

Well, now the kids are up and the grackles have gone to show off for someone else. I was up with the rooster but made no progress on the seasonal program. I have, however, supper all planned out.

Revenge might be a dish best served cold, but we'll be having hot, steamy chicken pot pie.