Rude awakenings

Living in a cottage in the middle of nowhere is bliss. There is so little traffic that we look every time we hear a car engine. If we are expecting a delivery, we can usually hear the van turn into the lane and see it go whizzing past us, and then reverse slowly back. At night, there are no street lights so we can appreciate the stars on a clear night and sleep without the interruptions of town living -- car doors slamming, arguments in the street outside and the constant rumble of activity.

On the other hand, now we have long days and short nights, the wild life decide when it is time to wake up in the morning. Early one Sunday morning, we were woken by a thump on the roof, and a scrabbling on the tiles, followed by an even louder thump on the bedroom window. Paul leapt out of bed, pulled back the curtain to see a large, fat pheasant sitting on the very narrow window sill. The bird then flopped down into the garden (flight is not his forte), and sat there looking up at the window shouting as only a pheasant can. We think this was to let us know the bird feeders were empty. On balance, we decided not to go and fill them, or else we would be up every morning at 5am feeding the birds.

Some mornings we are woken by a sound similar to an electric saw, which ends with a series of glottal stops, then starts the sawing again. None of the bird song websites seem to have this particular rendition, so Paul had to get up one morning and sneak downstairs to catch the culprit. It was our friend the red legged partridge, sitting halfway up the apple tree, trying to work out how to get to the peanut feeder. He seems to have invented his own song, as he doesn't sound anything like the BBC version of a partridge.

You've noticed that the valiant identifier of early morning birdsong is Paul, not me. I'm not so keen to solve the riddles. Soon after we moved here, we were both awoken at about 4am by a high pitched alarm in our bedroom. In our befuddled state of mind, we convinced ourselves it was a carbon monoxide alarm, partly because that was the only instruction book we could find at that time of night. We opened all the windows, and spent the rest of the night counting the seconds between red and green lights flashing on the alarm on the ceiling. The following day, we realized it was actually a smoke alarm, and the unit can be triggered by dust and insects. Probably one of the cottage spiders had a rude awakening as well.