One of the most striking things about living on island is what isn’t here: noise. We live on a dead end road with only a half a dozen houses all on the ocean side of the street. Only one other house is a primary home and that’s at the other end of the road. Typically the houses around us are vacant; there is nothing but bush behind us; and the Caribbean Sea fills the 5 miles of open space in front of us until the waves lap at the shore on St. Martin.
The sound of that sea is mostly all we hear. We casually notice when the sea becomes calm or when it’s particularly rough, but mostly it just fills the void with background, white noise. On the rare occasion when the direction of the wind shifts to come in from the west, it takes us a while to realize that we can hear the low hum of the ferry boats crossing the channel. And when the dragsters elude the police and manage a quick race on the highway north of us, we are unfortunately aware of the activity. Typically, though, the television isn’t left on, and we don’t play the radio. There’s rarely even music playing since all of our cd’s were tucked away when Michael discovered iTunes.
Our cats are pretty quiet – as cats tend by nature to be. They might make a fuss when they are frustrated by a gecko keeping a safe distance on the ceiling or if they lose track of where I am and call out for me to find them. However, they rarely talk amongst themselves and never converse with me. It’s been years since we’ve been bothered by marauding bands of goats or cows, and the distant neighbor’s dogs aren’t as annoying as they could be (that’s tactful coming from a veterinarian). Pelicans and hummingbirds are characteristically mute, but the occasional laughing gull chuckles by. Thrasher birds chirp at each other, and the bananaquits tweet. It all makes for pretty, pleasant background music.
However, as I’ve mentioned before (see the previous post, “Wildlife in Anguilla”) the chickens and roosters can be quite vocal and rather annoying (especially at 3AM!). That’s why, sadly, I am back to trapping chickens again and am still trying to catch one now lonely and now clearly frustrated rooster. After I caught two chickens, though, I noticed a cheeping noise outside the office window. Time after time I snuck out into the yard trying to find what I feared were orphaned chicks looking for their mother. Time after time, I failed. With as much stealth as I could muster, I would creep, step by step, inch by inch, trying to hear them rustling in the leaves. I’d peep my head through the buttonwoods to check the yard next door. I would check behind walls. No luck. I couldn’t see them anywhere.
Of course, I wasn’t looking up. Baby chickens don’t fly. So it was days of searching before I finally realized that the cheeping wasn’t coming from little chickens. It turns out that there were three baby kestrel hawks calling from the corner of the roof next door. Their parents must have left them to fend for themselves. So, the noise was chicks screaming for their mother but not because I made them orphans. That was a relief. Now the young ones fly back and forth from the roof to the phone lines cheep, cheep, cheeping all the time. So, between the kestrels and that rooster, I’ve got quite a cacophony of noisy, frustrated birds outside.
