We are incredibly fortunate to live in a very small rural village in the middle of the countryside. On a still Sunday you can stand in our garden and listen to the church bells. The farming in these parts is arable; the fields behind our house grow various cereals on rotation. A few times a year there’ll be some tractor action out there, but for the most part we just listen to the sound of crops growing.
Except farmers like their crops to grow and produce a yield that can be harvested. Birds have other ideas. So to discourage the feathery little bastards darlings Farmer Giles (name changed to protect the innocent) has installed half a dozen gas-powered bird scarers around their sizeable acreage. These things:
The first scarer sounds at 7am weekdays and 7.30am weekends. This is very considerate. It sounds like a large 12-bore shotgun and it fires a double tap. The last one goes off at 5pm. This too sounds like a shotgun and is also very considerate.
But the ones that go off in between sound like heavy artillery. As in heavily-armoured self-propelled artillery:
There’s at least one dog in the village petrified of the really loud stuff. I saw him a couple of days ago clinging to his owner’s leg and shivering in fright. Poor thing.
Gas powered, eh? Always wondered how they work.
I don’t live in a little rural village, I live in Luton.
We still hear 12-bore shotguns occasionally.