The road through our village has intermittent traffic.
There are no major flight paths going over our valley.
Our village is quite small, it often happens that no one is out in the fields on their tractor or up in the forest with a chainsaw.
Together these mean that quite frequently there are periods when there is no man made noise.
How often does that happen in your locality?
Do you even notice or is the daily noise you are subjected to so ubiqutous you don't even hear it? Sometimes it's not til you find yourself somewhere quiet that you realise how deafening is the silence.
And it is deafening.
There's the constant chit chat of the little birds.
Constant.
The varied buzz of passing bees, each one like a different lawn mower motor zooming back and forth - some a high pitched electric motor, others an industrial big diesel.
There's the rasping crows, punctuating the hum as they travel across the valley.
And the trees. Making a constant waterfall of noise as they move in the breeze.
It's never silent.
Which reminds me of a book I read as a teenager - Silent Spring.
It warns how one day the dawn chorus could be no more in the uk.
How lucky I am, I thought, that I can hear it before its gone.
And then I came here, and heard a real dawn chorus.
Do you know what you are missing?
The deafening silence of the countryside.
Together these mean that quite frequently there are periods when there is no man made noise.
How often does that happen in your locality?
Do you even notice or is the daily noise you are subjected to so ubiqutous you don't even hear it? Sometimes it's not til you find yourself somewhere quiet that you realise how deafening is the silence.
And it is deafening.
There's the constant chit chat of the little birds.
Constant.
The varied buzz of passing bees, each one like a different lawn mower motor zooming back and forth - some a high pitched electric motor, others an industrial big diesel.
There's the rasping crows, punctuating the hum as they travel across the valley.
And the trees. Making a constant waterfall of noise as they move in the breeze.
It's never silent.
Which reminds me of a book I read as a teenager - Silent Spring.
It warns how one day the dawn chorus could be no more in the uk.
How lucky I am, I thought, that I can hear it before its gone.
And then I came here, and heard a real dawn chorus.
Do you know what you are missing?
The deafening silence of the countryside.
No comments:
Post a Comment