Sorry I didn't post this earlier. Totally slipped my mind. You see, I got a whole night's sleep without being awakened by raccoons for a change and it threw me off.
"Raccoons?" you ask. Umm, yeah. Raccoons are not always the friendly-looking, forest bandits chittering away like funny little people. Sometimes they shriek at each other. When they're fighting. When they're staking territory. When they're laying claim to a mate. It ain't sweet. They're kinda vicious. And since they do the majority of their lives' activities at night, they've been playing raccoon games after we've gone to bed.
You see, in case you missed it, I live in the woods. Well, I have woods on two sides, a vacant field with trees on another and the treed front yard. Woods = critters.
The first week we were here, something startled a wren at 2am and it started singing. If you don't know Carolina wrens, they are incredibly loud little birds. Anyway, it startled us both out of a sound sleep. Also, at first, the morning symphony of birdsong was deafening. And this for two people who lived a block from the train tracks in the little city where we had been ensconced.
And then there were the coyotes. Eerie sounding buggers. Sometimes far off. Sometimes in our back yard. (Or at least they sound like they're in the back yard.)
And owls. We have barred owls and great horned owls here. We had GHO back in Colorado, but these are closer and more frequent. Big bunch of hootin' goin' on.
We got used to the trains. We got used to the birds. We got used to the owls, but that was easy. We even got used to the coyotes. We'll get used to the raccoons, too. Not sure why those devils waited 4 years to get comfortable enough to party in our yard, but they're here. Oh, we've seen them before. They like to eat the deer corn after lights out. But this is the first year they've been noisy about it.
Nature is noisy. Still, I'd rather have all the nature noises. The spring peepers are awake, so add frogs to the list. And cicadas. It's an entire orchestra of sound out here in the middle of nowhere, and so much nicer to my ears than cars and trains and the backbeat of some moron's car stereo at three in the morning. But I got used to those, too.
Now, I just have to find a way to sleep through 'Springtime for Raccoons'. ;o)
What's noisy where you are?
Last night it was thunderstorms. We had a series of humdingers roll through. All. Night. Long.
ReplyDeleteNow, I enjoy thunderstorms. But I like sleeping, too.
I can ignore the train horns (two miles away) and the coyotes (sometimes very close). And once in a while red wolves howl. They're pretty cool. :-)
Sometimes the quiet is the scariest noise of all.
ReplyDeleteI guess the real noisiest thing around here is when the planes fly overhead. Pilots at Wright-Patt AFB have to do so many touch and goes and we don't live too far from the airfield. So they tend to fly these monster planes over our house. Oh, and the jets. Hear those a lot too.
The only time I hear raccoons is when they're trying to eat my chickens.
ReplyDeleteRight now the noisiest thing are the woodpeckers during the daytime.