Today...

...a goldfinch flew into the garden this morning. A beautiful little red face.

This is the top pencil drawing. I spent awhile this morning but it wasn't easy. The song is very varied, but I cannot do it justice. Thinking about it tonight, with hindsight, this song needs to be presented in a much longer landscape format. But I don't want to spend any more time on this one, because there is nothing within the song that makes the bird instantly recognisable. In a sense, I need something distinctive within the song, almost like a caricature. And there are other birds singing in my garden which give me that.

The bottom pencil drawing is the magpie's voice. That is accompanied by the alarm calls of many other birds in my garden. Wren, robin, blackbird, blue-tit, great-tit and more. The blackbird being the most vociferous. Mainly because we have a young bird in one nest who hasn't flown yet. The other two nests have flown.

So this is my pic for today for my challenge to myself of a pic every day in 2017.

Mr and Mrs Blackbird are very protective of this young bird. I think there has only been one egg hatched all along because Mr and Mrs Blackbird have never harassed feeding this young bird. It has always been a leisurely activity almost.

Now, with this new mapping on my cochlear processor, I am able to pick up the bird's wings as they fly in and out of the nest. So I can hear them each time they enter and leave the nest. But, the crows have made their presence known recently, and so has the magpie whose call sounds a lot like me as 'Rajit Rajit Rajit'.

Their presence prompts Mrs Blackbird to fly to the end of my garden where she flies to and fro beating her wings against the leaves of the bushes. And at the same time she is making a noise from her throat. You can see her throat pulsating. But she doesn't open her beak. She also does that when there is activity in the vicinity of the fledgling in the nest, where it looks like the young bird is practicing flapping it's wings. I cannot see it, but it is making a racket. Mrs Blackbird keeps up making her wing noise against the leaves flying back and forth, and her throat noise.

It took me awhile to realise she was being a decoy to keep the youngster safe. It is not safe on the ground here, so I suppose the fledgling has to get its practice in the bushes round the nest.

I would never have heard anything like this with the old mapping, so this has been keeping me very interested in this the last week or so. Sometimes I have been going up the garden to see Mrs Blackbird and standing next to her while she has been doing this. She is not in the least fazed by me, nor fazed by my cats. She does check their whereabouts, as do I.

It was really funny when she got on the seat of the garden chair and bent her head down under it to check on white cat Suki who was fast asleep under it.

A couple of day ago mum and dad bird had been absent awhile so I checked on the nest. Standing on the edge of the nest was a sullen teenager. I had to laugh. It looked at me indignantly. It was a very healthy young adult bird which looked well capable of leaving the nest.

Mum and dad Blackbird came back and fed it, but they seem to be bringing smaller meals now. I think they too think it is time it flew the nest.

Without this new mapping I would never have learnt so much about these blackbirds. I hadn't realised sound could impart so much information. They are very vociferous now. I am sitting in the potting shed, listening.

But, I am still having problems with human speech in the real world. The audiologist did think this would take months and didn't expect me to have learnt/adapted to it by the time I see her in a couple of weeks.

The only thing is, it isn't just that, but it is the way it affects everything else as well. Today I went to the wi fi cafe to do some research on their computers. To begin with it was very quiet, and I was doing good, and saving the interesting cochlear links to Pinterest (because I am on a public computer). I found scientific papers on the cochlear implant on older people. And some on pre-lingually deafened older recipients (I was born deaf and acquired speech when I was about 7yrs old when an old lady taught me to speak by vibrations and blowing raspberries on balloons), so apparently that does not make me a very desirable recipient for the cochlear implant...born profoundly deaf and having been taught how to speak, but not by hearing it, and not having the implant until in my 60's.

I was looking for stuff that might help me deal with this vastly changed re-mapping.

Then I found a link on some stuff for online hearing practice to get used to the mapping. I thought great, get this link. I was about to put the link in Pinterest when a pile of noisy people came in. My brain couldn't cope. It couldn't make even a tiny bit of sense of the sudden noise of people talking.

But the big thing was I couldn't do my research on the computer any more. My brain couldn't function at that point to complete what I had been doing. I couldn't do any more research either. My brain seemed to be too focused on the cacophonous voices that were coming through my processor wanting to make sense of the voices like that was its over-riding task, and there was nothing I could do to persuade (?) my brain to return to the research I was doing on the computer.

I waited awhile, but my brain wasn't playing ball with me. Its focus was on interpreting voice sounds, literally over riding everything else, and appearing to use every available pathway towards this end, leaving nothing available for the activity I was doing.

I do not like this.

I was useless on anything I had wanted to be doing. I went home absolutely exhausted. Went to bed. Went to sleep for a few hours. Got up a couple of hours ago. Made something to eat and came in the potting shed to draw the magpie voice.

It felt today like I was standing stuck in thick mud and I couldn't get out of it. The word 'frustrated' is not the right word, because I didn't feel that. It was a total inability I felt.

When I slept earlier, I had a very deep sleep, then woke up fine. I needed that.

[This is my artist's perception of sounds as they are now after being drastically changed after the remapping of my cochlear processor. I am readjusting to the different sounds, which are actually vastly different, as it is now suggested I was never mapped properly in the first place which is why I have struggled the last few years.]