I had something similar and it was the router model being faulty. Run ookla and see what is your upload ping (not your idle ping mind you, there are 3). You should be no higher than 140. Interesting observation about the wildlife, this usually happens when autosaving I assume? It might be a leftover bug from creative btw, it happens there when the project gets big.
Also enable net debug stats from fn options to see your ping, you ll see it rise when it happens.
(I fixed mine by changing router, but lets not go that far yet)