30 March, 2020.

A nice burst of action in the yard this morning as I listen to a White- eyed Vireo with a great repertoire, watch a Hooded Warbler fan its tail in the shadows, study a Worm-eating Warbler probe dead leaves, and sort through multiple Orange-crowneds sorting through honeysuckle blooms. A tight group of swifts circled over in a brief appearance, and the locals and commuters are all taking their turns. White-winged Doves alternate between telling me "Pick up the shoes" and wing-fluttering and mating. Egrets and herons follow the same high invisible highway to and from some rookery.

Yesterday I caught a glimpse of raptor that looked like a Broad-winged Hawk, but it disappeared to the north before I could find an open viewpoint. I was happy later when I heard one scream and saw it circling over the neighborhood.

Sorry that I'm unable to contribute anything groundbreaking to our knowledge of Louisiana birds; after all, we all know when broadwings and swifts and Hooded Warblers return to the state, just as I know without seeing that Prothonotary Warblers and Purple Gallinules and eastern Willets are reclaiming their territories out there somewhere beyond my duty post. 

I should explain that I'm at home due to the outbreak of the virus. In essence, I'm being paid to stay safe, off the streets, and away from others. I'm being paid to stay healthy, and I take that duty seriously.

I haven’t been entirely unoccupied. It's been a good time to catch up on reading, and to revisit old reads. I was surprised to find that I'd misremembered some things: I didn’t recall that Sparta was to blame for the Persian Invasion because the Spartans at Thermopylae were the first Greeks killed by the enemy, nor did I remember that the Greeks thought the invasion was no worse than tourism, or that the main force of the Greeks showed up late for the battle without enough weapons and armor even though the first battle of the war bought them extra time and warning.  

I also didn’t recall the scene in the Iliad where Achilles decides to leave his tent to go sightseeing all over Troy and asks his comrades, “What could possibly happen to Achilles?”

Of course, I was reading an internet copy of these works. Maybe someone's been revising Herodotus and Homer to sway simple minds. Deep states and shallow minds. 

Maybe the moral is to be careful what you read: Some enemies are too small to see; others are the size of your friends. 

Otherwise, gardening and watching empty skies has been occupying my time, but that’s OK. Painlessly little has been asked of me, and I can handle a small responsibility. 

I can only hope that, like the tree that falls in the middle of the forest, migration this spring will happen even if no one's there to see it. I've heard that traffic is so bad in some remote, uninhabited spots that the dust is hard to see through. I can at least be glad that while I may not have a lot of birds in the yard, at least there's no dust.  

I hope that someday soon I can prove that the sky is blue, the sun is bright, and that Newcastle has coal. For now, those great unknowns will have to occupy the footloose while the rest of us nibble at the corners of a microscopically smaller problem hoping that little by little does the trick. 

One pebble at a time to lift the water level; then we can all quench our cravings. 

And as my mother always says, "If you're bored, it's because you're boring." Stay at home.