1613 Keen

Monday, December 24, 2007

This started out as a response to Chis's comment on entry #1611, where he asks if the strange noises could have anything to do with a fault zone. I decided to make my response to his query an entry itself:

Not a fault zone, exactly. But the house is perched on a rock ridge, about 2 miles from the Hudson river. Between here and the river is another ridge. Railroad tracks run along the banks of the river, and sometimes, not all the time but sometimes, I can feel the vibration of the trains. Something to do with the rock shelves, I suppose.

Sound carries very far, too. There was a police bagpipe band that practiced IN a firehouse a good ten miles away as the crow flies, across the river, beyond two ridges, and on summer Sunday afternoons I could hear them clearly inside my closed house. The back wall of the house is about half glass, and it collects and amplifies sound. Outside, no one could hear the sound. Inside, I had a concert.

The keening I heard last night could have been coming from 10 miles or 10 feet away. It sounded like a half-asleep hawk, or a fawn in difficulty. (Or a rabbit dying, but I prefer to discount that one.) It continued off and on for three hours. It's too early for fawns, so I don't know.

The last time I heard a similar sound I was convinced it was a fawn in trouble. There's a doe who parks her new twin fawns in the woods just outside my bathroom window, and I thought perhaps one had gotten trapped somehow. When I investigated, I discovered the red-tailed hawks who nest out back were teaching their fledgelings how to fly and dive and soar, and the sounds were calls, encouragement, and exuberance.

It just SOUNDED like a distress call.
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