IT was, to say the least, a funny sort of summer. But just as we have got rid of the bats, we are now having trouble with the owls.

For us humans, summer never seemed to appear at all. Until autumn, that is. And there was not much of a spring, either.

February, however, was the warmest since sabre tooth tigers roamed the Dales according to the Met Office. But who believes the Met Office anyway?

And although the summer played havoc with us, our wildlife friends seemed to have done pretty well.

That brings us to the bats and the owls and the reason why Mrs C and I have not had a good night's sleep for months.

The bats, my regular reader will remember, are the yoofs who nest in the weekend cottages all through the summer. Normally, they hang upside down all day and only come out at night.

But this summer, the rain was so prolonged that they stayed in at night, too, melting their eardrums with jungle music so loud that even Owd Tom's cockerel began to oversleep. It was just nodding off as dawn came over Tup Fell when it should have been up there cock-a-doodle-doing.

The bats, thank heavens, have now backed their bags and gone back to their schools and colleges. But just as Mrs C and I were starting to dream of dreamless nights, the owls started.

Now we in Beggarsdale are pretty used to the owls in spring, when they a-courting go. The hoots and screeches may by a pain in the ear but they are a welcome sign that spring is upon us.

But it seems that this year their springtime racket was just a rehearsal for the great autumnal hootfest.

At Curmudgeon Corner, we seem to have an owl at each point of the compass and they spend the entire night howling threats at each other. This, an ornithological friend tells me, is quite normal: the young males from this year's broods are settling their hunting territories for the lean winter months ahead.

My ornithological mate, however, is an expert, and my views on such people are well known (see Met Office above).

My personal theory is that, because we had the warmest days of summer in mid-September, the fur and feathery inhabitants of the Dale are even more confused than us.

They do not, after all, have calendars or Japanese wrist watches which tell them the date at a glance. So they, too, are still waiting for summer.

Given the topsy turvy British weather since Global Warming, they will probably get it too: for Christmas.

This being so, all this hooting and hollering has nowt to do with marking out their winter territories. It's all to do with them looking for a bit of what the birds and the bees get up to: ie, the poor deluded creatures think it's the mating season.

Now I must make it clear that I like our owls. They are infinitely preferable to the aforementioned human bats who, fortunately, are not protected species like their winged brethren and, if putting them down may seem a little extreme, they should certainly be released back into the wild. In, say, the Outer Hebrides.

But in the meantime, how does one get a decent night's sleep?

*The Curmudgeon is a satirical column based on a fictitious character in a mythical village.

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