Last night, the bonehead neighbors up the street were launching bottle rockets in the general direction of a large hillside covered with dry grasses. Becky and I stood in the driveway, watching.
A familiar sound in the air: the barn owl, out for a night of hunting, was weaving frantically through the fusillade. It pushed hard against the wind. Finally making it to its nest in the palm tree, it screeched for another hour.
:) Write…write some more, Chris….I miss reading!!
The other evening I was trying to record the singing of the haunting “higurashi” cicadas (one of my favorite sounds in nature in Japan… in America my favorite sound is perhaps the call of the nighthawk or the loon, while in Europe maybe my favorite sound is the whistling of mute swan wings or the crazy laughing of kittiwakes, especially on windy grey days), but every time I started the record button some group of teenagers let off a barrage of firecrackers nearby and ruined the recording. There really is no other place for these kids to do such things around here, but then there really is no other place for me to do my own things either, and I wasn’t bothering anyone…