Noisy Dawn

Dawn comes these days right about 7. Last week, it was later of course - that means while I was on the train. Before that, it was while I was eating breakfast, and next week it'll be while I'm on the bus heading for the train. Then it'll all jump back a bit with the arrival of daylight savings ... and eventually it will be before I even get out of the house. In fact, though in the dead of winter I'm in the building at work before sunrise, at the height of summer I get up only a few minutes before.

But nautical twilight is early enough now that, if the skies are clear, I can read while waiting for the bus, even if I usually miss the actual moment of sunrise. And that means I'm waiting for the bus as the birds wake up. "Happy birds," the guy at the bus stop usually says; I tend to think of them as more like "Hey! Don't you even think about coming over here!" Birds' lives are hard...

But yesterday I was up just before dawn and looking out off the balcony - it's been much too cold to do that until recently - and noticed something I'd never noticed before. There's a tall tree - I think a poplar - across the parking lot, and it was slowly filling up with birds. They hadn't spent the night there; they were coming, one by one, in the clear early morning light and settling into its bare branches. And they were calling - I won't say singing - loudly, a cacophonous screeching.

Starlings. One came down off the top of my building, where it nests, and headed in a graceful curve for the tree where it joined the others, passing quite close to me, so I'm sure of it: starlings. I know they stalk through the grass in flocks, and fly in flocks, so I suppose they live separately and join up with each other as the day begins. Why they screech so, I don't know: "Hey, you - this is our tree; get outta here!" perhaps, or "Hey, over here, that's right!" maybe? Or maybe - this one I like - they're like Larson's dogs, just mindlessly yelling.

Yeah. I don't like starlings. I've read that many Europeans do, and all I can think is that there must be something over that that keeps them in check. Over here, they swarm, they're noisy and unattractive, and they mess with our native birds, crowding them out. That idiot who brought them over - what a moron.

Still, the sight of them filling up that tree against the lightening sky was quite something. They were only there for fifteen minutes or so, maybe less, and then they were off in a crowd to do whatever they do. Rhythms of the day ... even here.