The raucous, jack-hammer cacophony of nature.

Image © Julie R. Neidlinger. All rights reserved.

I went for my evening masochistic mile run and again wondered why people want to move to a rural area for the silence.

I heard no silence. People are so attracted to Thoreau’s mythical Walden.

Perhaps it was due to the irritation I felt from swallowing a baker’s dozen worth of sandflies while gasping for breath as I chugged down the road, but the noise of nature was anything but silent.

Between the odd soft yipping-barking of the muskrats and the howling of the coyotes, there were also the crickets, frogs, killdeer, owls, mourning doves, sparrows, meadowlarks, blackbirds, red-winged blackbirds, barn swallows, mud hens, ducks, Canadian geese—where is this silence I hear so much about?

The only silence here is in the winter when everything has gone away and the world is mute.

Twittering shrieking dive-bombing squawking cooing popping screeching croaking hooting tweeting chirping honking quacking cawing grating yelping howling—

“SHUT UP!” I yelled, swallowing another sand fly in the process. I couldn’t even hear myself think with all that racket. “Just shut up!”

A brief moment of silence was quickly followed by some smart-aleck owl wanting to know who I was talking to.

I understand that everything has its place. This also includes bird shot.