Birds, and the Noises They Make

Not too long ago, a group of songbirds made it their habit to sing me awake in the morning.  (Well, I doubt that was their intent, but it was certainly their effect.)  Every morning for about two weeks, they'd alight on the shared terrace outside my apartment and warble away to their hearts' content. 

The first day it happened, I awoke confused: the reverberating chorus had an unearthly quality about it, as if it were playing inside my head, a surprising melody emanating from some unknown place within me, rather than coming from an external source.

I hopped out of bed and rushed to the window.  There were five of them perched on the windowboxes, and when they sang they threw back their heads - beaks pointing straight into the air - and bent their legs as if the gathered effort of the entire body were required to release the song inside.  And it may well have been; I saw images of my high school chorus instructor admonishing us to give ourselves "good support" and sing "from the diaphragm!"

The birds faced inward, throwing their song into the sound-amplifying space towards my door.  Apparently they liked to hear themselves sing.

 

Alas, one morning they failed to appear.  I was forced to drag my own sorry self out of bed, taking a bleary look out the window before resorting to coffee: No sign of them.  I felt a fleeting moment of regret at the absence of my morning songbuddies and then went about the business of waking up (which, for me, is slow and tedious).

 

Little did I know that fleeting moment would come back to haunt me.

 

Four or five nights ago, I woke up around 3:30am to a strange sound coming from the street outside.  It was a kind of hoarse, throaty sound somewhere between a moan and a hacking cough.  Strangely, it repeated at intervals.  That last sentence probably clued you, dear reader, in on what the sound actually was.  Later, around 6am, I would realize that the conjectures floating through my mind at that earlier, groggier hour - drunk guy retching; person with stomach ulcers; woman giving birth - made no sense in connection with the sound itself.  At the time, I simply pulled the pillow over my head and went back to sleep.

 

Lucidity at 6am, when the hacking sound renewed itself with a vengeance.  My eyes flew open.  It couldn't be.  Not here.  I live in the largest city in Ecuador.  There is an extensive bus system, about 20 different shopping malls, and if I really wanted to I could, for my own entertainment, pay money to bounce around inside a giant inflatable hamster ball floating on a pond.  What I'm trying to say is, There's infrastructure! commercialization! and something resembling culture!

 

YET.

 

Guess what else there is in Guayaquil?

 

I'll tell you what else there is in Guayaquil, there's roosters in Guayaquil.  Live roosters.  The kind my colleagues who live in rural areas complain about.  The kind that wake you up at all hours of the night and morning.  I should know, there's one living right down the street from me and he's been announcing his presence at the worst moments all week.

 

In a frenzy of research on how to get roosters to can it, I came across something helpful in the trusty advice column of a back issue of our Peace Corps-Ecuador volunteer magazine:

 

Do you know anything about training a rooster to crow at 6am instead of 3am?
Sleep Deprived in Súa

So here is the thing about roosters: they usually crow when they wake up.  If your rooster is crowing at 3am without any sign of dawn, I say there is a problem with its circadian rhythm.  One’s circadian rhythm is pretty much an internal clock dominated by a light exposure, namely the sun.  Nicknamed the “Third Eye,” the superchiasmatic nucleus is responsible for the functioning of the circadian rhythm in humans.  I’m not that familiar with avian neuroanatomy, but I would guess the rooster has some analogous nucleus which operates in a similar fashion.

So what do you do?  If the answer isn’t obvious enough, you simply need to blindfold your rooster.  When?  The best time to nab your male chicken is when it’s asleep, BUT don’t remove the blindfold until around 6am, or whatever time you want for that matter.  After a week or two of blindfolding, your rooster’s biological clock will start to adjust to this new schedule.  The only thing you’ll have to worry about is that you may have obviated its use as an alarm clock because you’ll be waking up before he does.

By the way, I knew all that stuff about circadian rhythms BEFORE I fact checked myself with various web-based resources.

This pearl of wisdom comes to us from Ronald, long-time advice columnist and our in-house expert on Everything.  Practically speaking, here is what Ronald's advice means for me:

 

Step 1 Find the rooster's house

Step 2 Sneak in and blindfold the rooster every night

Step 3 Sneak in and unblindfold the rooster every morning

 

As for a contingency plan...  Despite the fact that I've never harmed an animal in my life, I really would love to get my hands on this one. I'm sure I could manage.