Two things turned up in earnest this week — the osprey and leaf blowers. Both are noisy; one is brain-gratingly annoying. If it were up to me, we would have a lot more birds and a lot fewer blowers.
The February blizzard toppled an osprey platform at Pond o’ Pines that had gotten too heavy. Over the years, osprey pairs had piled more and more sticks on the nest, leaving it by the end of last season at a precarious slant. Someone was paying attention, and within a month of the storm, a new, wood and wire platform awaited the returning birds. It is perhaps too soon to know if they will adapt to the new setting. With only a handful of sticks left atop the wire mesh, it might not be as enticing.
I took a walk the other evening after work out over the saltmarsh to the nest pole. A heap of sticks, dung, and found objects, including short lengths of rope, lay on the ground. It was enough to easily fill two wheelbarrows. I heard a single osprey keening somewhere in the air but could not spot it.
Even before getting out of my car at the Star office the next morning, I heard the leaf blowers. As with the previous evening’s out-of-sight osprey, it was not obvious what direction the sound was coming from. The Star building is surrounded by properties on which leaf blowers are almost continually used. Sometimes it seems that the noise is coming from all directions, which, in all probability, it is. It makes being outside all but unbearable a lot of the time.
From the front of the building, I was able to locate two men making the noise across the way from the library at the corner of James and Dunemere. It was a considerable distance, but the annoying buzz seemed as if it were coming from mere feet away. The two attacked the sidewalk from one direction, then turned around and blew everything back the other way. Lord knows what they thought they were accomplishing.
A ban-the-blowers movement is underway here at the moment. It seems to me that the time has come. Rules about when gas-powered blowers can and cannot be used are really for weekenders and not about the people who actually live here and might, perish the thought, want to be outside on a weekday.
Electrics are increasingly up to the task. And, even if they were not, our being able to enjoy our surroundings without being driven indoors to spare our hearing and preserve our sense of peace would be well worth it.