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Wednesday 27 March 2019

Birdnoise


Birdnoise

O for the peaceful quiet of rural pursuits
The calm of the countryside
Of England in the summertime
But not with this combined cacophony
And masses of movement
Of our fine feathered friends!

The sprinkling speech of sparrows
The bit-by-bit bantering of blue-tits
The rosy red-breastedness of robins
There’s the calling, cawing croaking of crows
The boisterous blathering and bantering of blackbirds
The stammering of stuttering starlings
The posing and posturing of pigeons
The delicate dancing of doves
The mind-blowing movements of martins
With sweet sweeping of swallows
And swooshing and swooping of swifts
The great gannet-like greediness of gulls
The shouting and screaming of seagulls
The raucous roisterous rowing of ravens
The whacking of woody woodpeckers
The buzzing of bantering buzzards
The keen calling of cantankerous kites
The flash and the flurry of fast-flying falcons
The pure power of peregrines
The hovering of hawks in the heavens
The careful control of the kestrels
The heavy-handedness of huge herons

And, at last, as the sun sinks in the West
You’d think it was finally all over
That quiet would descend on the scene
But that’s just in the daytime!
Between the dawn and the dusk!
Because, by night, there’s the awful, orrible ooting of owls!

Copyright Andy Fawthrop 2019

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