The Big Yard: Birdwatching in a Time of Quarantine

Or: The Evolution of a Guilt-ridden Lister

#127 for the Pandemic, a Gray Catbird the color of shadow. The Arizona rarity favors streamside thickets in our lowlands and mountains.

Day 208 of the Quarantine (October 8, 2020)

            Life bird #435.  I got it without putting any carbon into the atmosphere except that expelled from my lungs walking to my back porch where I sat sipping coffee with binoculars and camera.  In my PJs.  Two days ago, I drove for two hours for no life birds, having dipped on the ruff.  Today, a gray catbird flabbergasted me by materializing in the chokecherry tree adjacent to the Covid fountain, one gleaming obsidian eye trained on me as if I were the anomaly.    

I should just allow the birds to come to me.  No clothes necessary.

            Is it that I’m paying more attention during the Pandemic?  The past few months have given me so many firsts for the yard I’m fearful of shifting my eyes away from the fountain: summer tanagers and pacific-slope flycatchers, hermit, red-faced, and Grace’s warblers.  A single black-throated sparrow like a door swinging open…127 species altogether and now a gray catbird.  A bird never recorded in the Mule Mountains and a rarity anywhere in Arizona where eBird lists less than a thousand total observations.

#103 for the Pandemic, the Pacific-slope Flycatcher is common in the spring and fall as it migrates to and from breeding grounds in the Pacific Northwest and western Canada.

#107 for the Pandemic (and life bird #430), the Hermit Warbler is a fairly uncommon migrant in the spring and fall. This one from a month ago is the first-ever for my yard.

#125 for the Pandemic, Grace’s Warbler is common in southeast Arizona from spring to fall. This one is a first for the yard.

#122 for the Pandemic, a first-for-the-yard Black-throated Sparrow.

My gray catbird will be the only one reported on this day in the county, maybe the state, a stunning discovery that makes me question the reality of it. It’s like “le pointe vierge,” the virgin point of pure truth, that Thomas Merton observed about birds, how they stand outside of time at a place “between darkness and light, between nonbeing and being.”

            Until one steps into view and becomes real by the act of being seen.  Schrödinger’s catbird.

            (I’m working on a theory about birds and quantum mechanics, that while humans are easily deceived, birds know that time does not pass, that space is not distance.)

Maybe I’m simply more observant. But my friend, Jim Gorman, who lives on our border with Mexico five miles away, says no. “I can assure you it’s not, Ken,” he said when I suggested this with the appearance of a Townsend’s solitaire and a yellow-breasted chat, “because I have a water bath/feature and I pay attention from sunup. And I’ve had maybe 11 or 13 species.”  

            Another friend thinks an “anomalous high-pressure vortex” over my house is drawing the birds.  I tell him the vortex is my wit and charm.   

            Or, possibly, the birds are always here, waiting for me to take a seat in front of the fountain and notice them stepping out of the shadows.  Annie Dillard says we live and move by splitting the light of the present, as a canoe’s bow parts water. 

I part the birds.

#110 for the Pandemic, the Yellow-breasted Chat—also new to the yard last month.

#124 for the Pandemic, the Townsend’s Solitaire is uncommon in the fall and winter. This one, from a few days ago, is the first in the yard since 2013.

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