The Big Yard: Birdwatching in a Time of Quarantine

Or: The Evolution of a Pajama Lister

A wild-eyed Curve-billed Thrasher, a common resident of southwestern desert scrub.

Day 250 of the Quarantine (November 19, 2020) 

The wife and I drive to Sierra Vista in the morning.  For the first time since the pandemic began nine months ago, we’re getting tested for Covid 19.

            And there’s a line.  A long line of vehicles that stretches a quarter mile and turns into the parking lot where a white tent shades three frontliners in scrubs and masks.  At twenty minutes per car, the line creeps along in rare erratic spurts. 

            I turn off the engine and Karen reads through the paperwork for the hundredth time.  I watch a curve-billed thrasher with a tail as long as its body fly to the chain-link fence and tilt back and forth like a feathered metronome.  Tick…tock…tick…tock…tick…tock…  65 beats per minute.

            Doves coo.  Mourning doves mourn.  The white-wings say, “two cars then move...two cars then move...two cars then move.”  A lone Inca dove cries, “No hope.  No hope.  No hope.”

A Mourning Dove, widespread across the US unlike the White-winged Dove, which inhabits the Southwest and Mexico.

The Inca Dove, a common resident in the Southwest and Mexico (and probably better named the “Mexican Dove” since its range doesn’t included what was once the Inca Empire.)

            Two hours later, I’m ready to make the turn into the parking lot when a truck coming up on my left cuts me off.  Horns blare.  A guy wearing a bandana walks past headed for the truck.  “Can you believe this guy?” he says to me.

            There’s a heated exchange.  Voices and posturing.  Karen wants me to back up, but I don’t want to lose my place in the queue...again.  More horns sound off.  The guy in the bandana heads for one of the technicians who is looking in our direction.  More hand waving.  She walks to the vehicle and asks the driver to pull out of line, then she removes the barricade, and the truck drives off.  She comes to my open window.

            “I’m so sorry,” she says.  “This was unexpected…the lines, the waiting.  We had no idea.”

            “No worries,” I say.  “We’re not in a hurry.”  My eyes shift to the dark shadow of a turkey vulture circling the pavement.  Then another.

            “Sorry you have to deal with people like this,” Karen adds. “Thanks for being here.”

            From somewhere, a raven croaks.

            Twenty minutes later, a bit of paperwork and nasal swabbing and we’re done.  We should get the results in a few days.

            Despite the long lines and the appearance of general concern about the virus, half the country isn’t taking it seriously.  People are literally dying in denial.  Literally.  This coming from nurses working hospitals in current hotspots like North and South Dakota, now called “North and South Dacovid,” according to my son-in-law who has family in Grand Forks.  They are all antimaskers.

            I had an exchange on social media with a friend who said we shouldn’t lock down because 99 percent of people infected with the virus recover.  “Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of victims and their families,” I said.  He replied by claiming that those numbers were skewed, that most of those deaths were unrelated to the virus.

            “You doubt the epidemiologists and scientists and their facts?”

“These so-called experts are stooges for the biased media,” he said, adding that his “common sense” was better than anyone with an advanced degree.

In the final chapters of Spillover, David Quammen says that the subject of a pandemic “like an airborne virus, is at large on the breezes of discourse.”  Scientists are on alert, he says.  “They are our sentries.  They watch the boundaries across which pathogens spill.”  The problem isn’t with the scientists, he admits, once they raise the alarm.  The number of people who die will be up to us.  “It will depend on how we citizens respond.”

            I wonder what David Quammen thinks today, eight years after he wrote his book.  Could he have imagined this response?  As they say, we’re going to have to retire the expression “Avoid it like the plague” because people don’t do that.

            From somewhere, a raven croaks.

A Chihuahuan Raven of the Pandemic. Among all birds, ravens with their black cloak of feathers and hoarse calls, their penchant for eating carrion, seem to be always associated with powerful symbolism and mythology, especially concerning loss or death.

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