Anyone up for some noisy neighbours?
Just for a few months, until they’ve finished mating.
Dealing with invasive human noise pollution can be delicate. Our homes should be havens, shutting out the frenzied outside world for tranquillity and calm. Those who can afford to spend fortunes on design and decor to create places of comfort and peace. It’s a mega-money industry, particularly after we rediscovered our homes during the Covid lockdown era. It gave us the time to reflect on our living spaces. DIY, inside and outside, was all the rage and social media buzzed with shared ideas and projects. No time to be bored if you could paint a wall, hang some shelves or build a veggie box out of old wood or palettes.
It also gave many people the chance to check in with their neighbours, some possibly for the first time, since life had always been too busy. Lockdown meant you could chat over the walls ‒ at an appropriate social distance, of course ‒ and bemoan a shared fate. Even if you didn’t become best friends, lines of communication opened.
But noise can be a delicate issue; if your ears have been assaulted by what you may consider hideous music for a couple of hours, things can become emotional. Music is a subjective choice. When the neighbours love, say, Abba, and play it at volume 20, you could become a tad tetchy in your approach to ask them to lower the level. And they will be pretty grumpy if you either suggest an alternative you can all enjoy or imply that they’re old and deaf. Warfare has been known to happen in previously close communities.
My human neighbours are pretty cool and quiet. One house nearby but not right next door does love Abba and spreads the love, most often at Friday night deadline time when blood pressure levels are increasing anyway. It’s most useful to plug the ears and get on with work. But thoughts of a bazooka have occasionally surfaced.
The noisiest neighbours, however, are the very loud hadedas who have returned to their nesting spot two or three metres from my office/lounge window. I don’t blame them ‒ it’s a beautiful, large, sturdy and shady tree. I first watched them during lockdown and have seen at least one chick fledge. Out of the mating season, they appear to “stay home” irregularly, preferring to make their raucous calls from the more distant roof.
Watching or being in nature is a wonderful healer and I really love that they have moved in and let me watch their family grow.
One of their mating rituals is the clacking of beaks in which they rapid-fire tap their bills together. For ages. That’s how I knew mating season had begun. It was puzzling at first, these long periods of clicking sounds in the quiet “office”, but eventually the penny dropped.
It was confirmed by the now-regular early morning and evening greeting and proclaiming of territorial ownership in two-part disharmony to all wannabee intruders. They shout a lot.
Unfortunately, the evening cries tend to be made when I’ve settled in to watch TV and the raucous lovebirds drown out the reasonable sound levels: the show has to be paused or turned up.
Thankfully, it’s for a short time, or the TV would be so loud I could become a problem noisy neighbour.
- Lindsay Slogrove is the news editor
The Independent on Saturday