Insomnia in Wallingford always provides me an opportunity to monitor such sounds as the drunks pouring, bellowing, from Murphy's pseudo-Irish pub at every single 2am; a police car with siren blaring tearing full pelt down 45th at some point almost every night; and then the medley, from about 4:30 til 7:30am, of several garbage trucks that lift the dumpsters high before slamming them repeatedly to dislodge the last scraps of putrifying trash within, and of delivery trucks that idle for 15 minutes or so at my window while their drivers fart about at god knows what.

At family members' homes in Melbourne and particularly Canberra, insomnia has a far different soundscape. Silence, quite complete, until 4am. Then, one or two magpies will chortle a few times just as the chorus begins of aggravating twittering, barely real birdcalling at all, but incessant. It is produced by the introduced (i.e. bloody English) species - starlings and sparrows. Or, so I like to think the half-smothered skittering's producers to be.

Beginning at 6 or so, as the sky perceptibly lightens, something begins to coo-whoo in a way that is appealing, one or two hundred times, but becomes annoying well before the mllionth iteration. It probably is a dove, presumably a loving pair of same. The cooing is punctuated by a caw-shriek, more attractive because it hints of the tropics, although Melbourne is on the damp and dank end of the rainforest spectrum.

The morning in Melbourne is marked by a thump as my nephew Neddy climbs down half way from his loft bed before jumping the rest, thudding to ground, shaking the whole house but miraculously waking only me in the room adjacent while his brother and parents snooze on. At this time, a fuller chorus of birdcalls would be heard were it not for the jabber of the morning cartoons. Neddy parks himself on the sofa, three feet from the tv screen, and responds to no greeting of good morning, although he does register an offer of a blanket to warm him as he shivers entranced in the electric glow.

But the birds do, outside, go about their business, and the variety and number of them is like nothing in Seattle. Even in the city, one commonly sees many Australian magpies - the large, crow-sized variety that are given to quite dangerous bombing runs on humans during spring breeding - and many more peewees, smaller, more benign magpie lookalikes that are lighter in color and are more given to scrounging on the ground for insects and worms than to commanding territory through violence from on high. Throughout the day, green and red rosella parrots race and chase each other in threaded trails, dodging trees and buildings at high speed. They never come to grief in the seemingly high-risk activity. Their cousins, the galahs, are less skilled, and more likely to run into cars. They're grey, white, and the most preposterous pink, and travel about in flocks as small as a handful, as numerous as several hundred. Similarly gregarious are the large sulphur-crested white cockatoos that are most noticeable towards sunset, when they congregate en masse and engage in the most extraordinarily loud shrieking. You see them festooned in stands of trees, or busily swooping from one area of bush to another on a ceaseless round of noisy visiting. Their flocks are occasionally joined by a few black cockatoos.

At the other extreme of sociability, and these days far less often seen than they were when I was a kid and often one would be sitting in the backyard on a post in the morning, are kookaburras. They are almost always alone, and they really do laugh. But their call is far less matey and cute than is commonly claimed by, for example, the children's song about them; instead it seems part of some time-and-space continuum that is not the one in which the population of post-European settlers operate, nor to which they seek much access.