Peep Peep!
Late on Friday night, just as it was beginning to think about turning into Saturday morning, I took the dogs out for their pre-bed stretch-and-widdle. It had been raining hard earlier on, but it was dry as I made my way up the road. I normally walk about four hundred yards or so up the hill towards the mountain road. There's a spot up there where the trees are set back further from the road edge, making a natural clearing that's as good a place as any to turn around. Sometimes the dogs come with me, but more often they wander around the farmyard making a nuisance of themselves until I come back and let them in. Buddug followed me up the road, as she always does, trying to trip me up in the dark and darting back and forth across the road and into the undergrowth like the oversized kitten that she is.
It's always peaceful here late at night. Not that there's much traffic during the day, but there's something soothing about the dark. We get a really good night sky on a cloudless night, and I've been known to lie in the road in the middle of the clearing sometimes just to stare at the stars. Friday night wasn't really suitable for that; big fat drops of rain plopping down like so many broken eggs from the branches that reach out over the road. It's never quiet - the stream that runs through the woods here and under the road just in front of the house is a constant noise that you soon forget, but it's always there. After the evening's downpour it was in spate, roaring as it made its way down towards the Peiran and on to the Ystwyth.
And all around me was the sound of little birds, gently peeping to each other.
I'm not sure what they were - it was too dark, and my torch is too feeble to penetrate the canopy, but they could have been Starlings. They must have been passing through and been caught out by the rain, but whatever they were there were hundreds of them. As I listened I could hear more and more, all gently calling to each other in the darkness, reassuring themselves that they hadn't been left behind. Their high pitched peeps echoed in the damp, foggy air and I had a bit of a Tipi Hedren moment, wondering if they could see me walking up the road with my killer cat. Were their calls the quiet bringing together of a plan to descend upon me in a frenzy of beaks and wings and claws? Had I stumbled into some apocalyptic scenario, where countless feathery creatures, their brains addled by avian flu, were waiting for the spark of madness that would launch them at me in a destructive fury?
As it turned out, they weren't and I hadn't. They were just a large number of damp birds making the most of the shelter to ride out an unexpected storm. But they kept up their gentle peeping for hours. I could even hear them from the bedroom window at two.
And then when I got up in the morning, they'd all gone.
It's always peaceful here late at night. Not that there's much traffic during the day, but there's something soothing about the dark. We get a really good night sky on a cloudless night, and I've been known to lie in the road in the middle of the clearing sometimes just to stare at the stars. Friday night wasn't really suitable for that; big fat drops of rain plopping down like so many broken eggs from the branches that reach out over the road. It's never quiet - the stream that runs through the woods here and under the road just in front of the house is a constant noise that you soon forget, but it's always there. After the evening's downpour it was in spate, roaring as it made its way down towards the Peiran and on to the Ystwyth.
And all around me was the sound of little birds, gently peeping to each other.
I'm not sure what they were - it was too dark, and my torch is too feeble to penetrate the canopy, but they could have been Starlings. They must have been passing through and been caught out by the rain, but whatever they were there were hundreds of them. As I listened I could hear more and more, all gently calling to each other in the darkness, reassuring themselves that they hadn't been left behind. Their high pitched peeps echoed in the damp, foggy air and I had a bit of a Tipi Hedren moment, wondering if they could see me walking up the road with my killer cat. Were their calls the quiet bringing together of a plan to descend upon me in a frenzy of beaks and wings and claws? Had I stumbled into some apocalyptic scenario, where countless feathery creatures, their brains addled by avian flu, were waiting for the spark of madness that would launch them at me in a destructive fury?
As it turned out, they weren't and I hadn't. They were just a large number of damp birds making the most of the shelter to ride out an unexpected storm. But they kept up their gentle peeping for hours. I could even hear them from the bedroom window at two.
And then when I got up in the morning, they'd all gone.
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