cheep imitations

I may have mentioned that we were hit by some rather stormy weather recently. I recall complaining about the wind, especially. It was loud and constant and one of the most annoying side-effects was even more noise - with the wind came power cuts, and with power cuts came the down-side of home security: Errant house alarms.
We live in a fairly new housing estate and all the houses have them and they all make the same piercing "wee-waw-wee-waw!" noise when they go off. With the storms we were having, they went off A LOT. Yes, even ours. One night the power was off long enough for the thing's battery to die and around 4am we awoke to a head-shattering scream. Fortunately, with no power and no battery, it sort of faded away to a "ploop-ploo-plo" all on its own and if it hadn't, at least we were there to turn it off.

Not so with one of the houses a block or so away. It seems someone had bought a house, set the alarm and then simply left. For weeks the thing was screeching; 30 minutes on, 5 minutes silence and then it would begin again. It was doing my head in! We could actually see the alarm box with its evil flashing blue light from our back yard, and we were beginning to wonder just how upset our neighbours would be if we procured a shotgun and blasted the thing to kingdom come. I could hit it from our back yard, I know I could! And I suspect the neighbours would have thanked us, too.
But as it turns out this no longer appears necessary as the offending gadget has now either run out of juice or has been turned off in the last two weeks or so.
However...

Last Saturday morning I was having my constitutional lie-in, waiting for Hubby to bring me my coffee in bed (yes I know, spoilt rotten, I am!) when the peace of the morning was sliced by the sound of that infernal alarm. Only... it sounded different. Not quite so shrill... and it would wail about three times then taper off.
And there was something odd about the tone of it, too.
And then the consistent "wee-waw-wee-waw" seemed to lose it's way a little and it dawned on me that it was in fact not an alarm, but a tweetie bird outside singing in the bright spring sunshine (because it was, indeed, a morning of glorious sunshine, never mind what the temperature was).
It seems the local wildlife is a little confused.
The poor creature has been brainwashed by the house alarms and he (or she) has now become a fixed feature in the neighbourhood, perched on a nearby chimney singing his little heart out like a house alarm until eventually, when he gets no similar response, he seems to tire of the tune and it then turns into a sort of remix version.
Who ever said life was dull in the 'burbs?!