At this time of year, I'm often woken by the dawn chorus. It's a beautiful sound. Usually. All those songbirds singing their little hearts out to welcome the sun - what's not to like? Except not all dawn choruses are that melodious.
Back when I lived on a boat, I was sometimes treated to a seagull dawn chorus in Gloucester. No one could accuse seagulls of having beautiful voices. Their cries are raucous, and also very loud - especially when inside a boat and directly underneath them. Being woken from sleep by what sounds like a horde of furious dinosaurs was not my favourite nature experience. There's the additional factor that seagulls are moving inland as a direct consequence of humans impacting on the sea, so nothing in this scenario is especially good.
Recently I was woken by a dawn chorus of house sparrows. It would be fair to say that sparrows are not musically minded and it was more like a very cheerful amount of shouting. However, given that sparrow numbers have fallen dreadfully, there's real charm in there being enough of them to be properly annoying in the early morning. I listened to them with a mix of annoyance and delight.
I like hearing birds. I'm not overly attached to songbirds in this regard - I love the calls of corvids and geese, for example. Mooring under a rookery was always a lovely thing to be able to do. My usual dawn chorus has a lot of magpies in it and I think the reason I usually go back to sleep is that their calls are entirely familiar so they impact on me differently. I don't think I could ever get used to seagulls, though, and am glad that I don't have to try!
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