The Wrong Side of the Dawn Chorus

Most of the bird song around here could only be called so by the very loosest of definitions. There's the odd crow or similar, but mostly it's gulls. Common gulls, herring gulls, black-headed gulls, and kittiwakes. The most inland breeding colony of kittiwakes in the world, in fact. But that's beside the point.

Gulls' cries can be eerily beautiful, in a lonely, dramatic sort of way. On the sort of overcast night you only get in a big city, when the lights reflect off the thick blanket to bathe everything in a purple glow, and ghosts soar and wheel against that weird smoke, wailing.

It's an odd blessing to light pollution.

Most of the time, though, they're annoying at best and very often alarming, when they catch you off guard and sound exactly like a human scream.

But there's odd blessings to insomnia too.

There is birdsong around here, and it's beautiful. I don't know what bird it is, but it sings so incredibly sweetly. I never wake up early enough to hear it, but occasionally, on summer nights when it gets light in what could still reasonably be called the wee small hours, and when I'm finding it particularly hard to get to sleep, the sky grows bluer outside my window until it's lighter than twilight. And the dawn chorus starts up. It's quite soft, and quite cheerful, and infinitely more musical than the gulls' efforts.

I was still awake after four this morning, and not because I hadn't gone to bed early. But despite hearing it at the wrong end of the day, I count myself pretty lucky for it.