The Ides of March (to May)

While the Romans and Shakespeare intended the ides to last a single day on the 15th of March, for me it usually lasts from March to May bookended by my dad's death and birth anniversaries respectively. Usually this is a time when I think about his life, our times together and the things he missed being a part of due to his untimely death. However, this year the Ides have taken on ginormous proportions due to the horrific outbreak of Covid in India. Just when things were beginning to look brighter in the US, the pandemic seemed to send us a shocking reminder of the need for constant vigilance. While I expected the systems in India to be not as sophisticated as in the West, this was a failure at many levels. The hubris of declaring victory so early can only be compared to W declaring "Mission Accomplished"in 2003, also in May! In both cases declaring premature victory led to complacency, confusion and colossal loss of human lives. While I don't blame just W or Modi for both these "Himalayan Blunders", take their leadership (or lack thereof) and add to it a heady mix of hypernationalism, hubris, and exceptionalism, you end up with a deadly combination (both literally and figuratively). Behind all the numbers and statistics there are personal stories of individual lives lost which is heartbreaking. There is a palpable sense of heightened anxiety coupled with fatigue/ burnout as this pandemic has gone on far too long. As I sat down to write today I wanted to wear my optimistic glasses to look at the world, but it is hard as the goalposts seem to keep moving. But I am going to take a crack at it. Maybe it is a  cracked looking-glass view of the world, but for now I will take it.

Looking back these past two months amidst all the horror, birds have been a constant source of joy to me. I have to say that Covid opened a few windows (albeit on my laptop) even as it shut a lot of others. Birdcams for one! I would have never had the time to look at BirdCams normally but this year everything was topsy turvy. I had to drop out of Feederwatch given the salmonella outbreak in California and I couldn't put my backyard feeder up. Instead here I was watching BirdCams from Cornell and participating in a data collection effort for a feeder in Ithaca! Oh and if I wanted to watch tropical birds I could always switch to the Panama feedercam. Every morning I would wake up to the sound of birds except they were not in my backyard but in Sapsucker woods or in Panama.

Then a friend of mine decided to take care of his rodent-problem by putting up an owl box with a ring cam. What luck, that the owl box was immediately occupied by a couple of barn owls and he was kind enough to share his stream with me! For the past two months we've been engaged in bird voyeurism spying on the pair as they did some fairly intimate and graphic acts! So far the female has not laid any eggs as her mate is not bringing in as many rodents as she would like him to. He seems to be of the "Wham-Bam-Thank-You-Ma'am" school (despite the tender picture below) and she is not ready to commit to raising a chick with him. But am still waiting to see if things change once we are past May.

We had another opportunity to watch birds when we signed up to monitor Vaux Swifts as they migrate from the South to the North during spring. San Diego is a layover in their long journey. These swifts rely on chimneys to roost in the nights and we were asked to monitor one such chimney and count the number of birds that showed up. Nothing we knew could have prepared us for the sights we witnessed. After a couple of nights of no luck, we hit jackpot on the third night of monitoring. About 2000 birds circled the air and put on a show unlike anything we've seen and then they all rushed into the chimney as though it was a blackhole that sucks anything around it. We went back multiple evenings to monitor these amazing birds and to have witnessed these record-breaking numbers has to be a silver lining amidst all the bleak news.

Finally we also went to hear live music for the first time in a year and a half! I had tickets to the SD Opera's Barber of Seville (my daughter's favorite opera) from 2020. That season was cancelled and this year they tried to offer a reduced version of the opera in the form of a drive-in. We remained in our cars, listening to the opera over FM, but with live orchestra and performers on stage which was beamed onto screens around the car park. Rossini could have never imagined that people would respond to his music with honks, but that's how we collectively applauded every aria. Would we ever get back inside a theater? I certainly hope so. But for now, the drive-in opera reminded me how much live music and a collective experience of it was soul-enhancing.

 

So here I am waiting for the Ides of May to tide over leaning on birds and barbers to get me through it. The pandemic has proven to us how vulnerable we are as a species and I am hoping that when we are out of this we lose some of our hubris and instead channel our efforts into understanding all forms of vulnerabilities around us. Watching My Octopus Teacher I found myself moved to tears at the bond between a mollusc and man. The ephemerality of life is all too familiar for countless species in the natural world. The pandemic is just forcing us to come to terms with our own. Today would have been my dad's 77th birthday. I haven't wished him in 18 years, but I am thankful for the time we spent together. As I hear of other friends losing loved ones during this past year, I only hope with time they are able to celebrate the life of the person they lost and find solace in shared memories.