The Big Yard: Birdwatching in a Time of Quarantine

Or: The Evolution of a Lister

Yard bird #100 for the Pandemic: The Black Phoebe

Day 122 of the Quarantine (July 13, 2020)

            This week, Arizona is a global hotspot for the coronavirus. More than 100,000 cases. Almost 2000 dead.  The US gained one million new infections in 28 days, climbing to 3 million, with no end in sight.

            We’re number one in the world.

“Such a tiny thing,” writer Pam Houston says, “asking people to put a strip of cloth across their face. So strange and frightening to walk among people knowing they don’t care if I or anyone else dies. But they don’t. I see it all over their unmasked faces.” 

            There are things in this world that might separate people from loving each other. But factless, science-denying politics shouldn’t be one of them.

            I retreat from this news into nature.  The birds, the trickle of water, the shade of trees attenuate my anxiety over a world I hardly recognize, epitomized by the endless moan of semi-trucks hauling steel bollards up our canyon for the construction of a pointless border wall.  I want to scream at the insanity.  Instead, I tune my mind to the rhythms in my yard, not so much as an escape from the world but as a penetration into it.  When a canyon wren trills, the highway is silenced.  When a lark sparrow slips in from Mexico, the wall is redundant.  It’s as if a decades-old former life of confinement prepared me for the pandemic.

Lark Sparrows (#99) move to higher elevations in summer, the only time when they show up in my yard.

A common resident of rocky hillsides and Bisbee yards like mine, the Canyon Wren’s cascading trill is the song of the West.

            One thing I learned then, the prison system doesn’t want change.  Its existence depends on the failure of correction.  In the same way, the virus thrives on complicity.  It wants us to hold to the status quo.  Nature, on the other hand, demands change, and the virus is nature’s correction.  She is a serial killer, as they say, and as a serial killer she is selective, culling the weak and vulnerable, yes, but also those who refuse to adapt.  Nature insists you either evolve or you go extinct.

            And nature persists.  Sobering thoughts that encourage me—like the surprising arrival this week of the lark sparrow.  And now, this morning, a black phoebe alights on the patio umbrella, wags her tail, and looks at me as if she owns the place.  Species number 100, one I’ve recorded here only once before.  A common bird but a rarity for the yard, her presence possibly due to the fire burning along the San Pedro River only ten minutes away.  I see the black and white flycatchers along the river regularly but today the cottonwoods are blooming into flames. We should be past the season of fire as we lean into the season of monsoon.

            The phoebe fills me with expectation.  I’m watching for other birds driven this way by the conflagration, although this is the hottest day of the year, pushing 102 degrees.  The chickens cackle in complaint.  They want me to set up their swamp cooler or they’re going on strike.  No eggs, hard-boiled or otherwise.

            Stewart the Rabbit, (Bunny Stew), stretches his black furry body full length along his ice block and lies motionless in his hutch.

            The Head Blond, my wife, the planner, the pathfinder, the woman who gives first-aid kits as wedding presents, requires neither ice blocks nor evaporative coolers, just ceiling fans and open windows at night.  She doesn’t mind the heat…like the virus.

Like the Lark Sparrow, the Phainopepla spends its winters in the low desert and moves into higher elevations in summer when it arrives in my yard.

Thanks for subscribing!