The Sound of Here

An entry for the Ecotone Wiki’s joint post on Sound of Place

As Numenius pointed out, yesterday at 4:00 am I got up trying to locate a calling barred owl.

I am not normally walking about at that time of day. Scorpius was rising in the south and the air was still. No barred owl. Lowing cattle—polled herefords, mostly. I don’t know why they do this some of the time and not others; it seems unrelated to when they get fed or the time of day. There it was, though: the drone of I-80. At four in the morning.

I write this at dusk and we just walked out and took more or less the same route. There were quite a few cars about, disturbing the frantic chattering of the Western kingbirds. But most of the other birds had stopped apart from a lone mockingbird—and a lone great-horned owl who was just waking up.

I yearn to hear all this sometime without human sound competing with it all, obliterating it. These days you have to go a long, long way to find that. Farther, I think, than the range of the Western kingbird.