During the truly locked down days of Covid, my stellar team of colleagues worked hard to preserve normalcy. We doggedly made our way through the agenda during our weekly staff Zoom. We reported on our deliverables as though we were sure they still mattered, and congratulated each other on keeping it together. When one of us couldn’t quite stay on keel, we paused and simply went through it together. Those of us who were used to drawing firm boundaries between the personal and professional watched those boundaries dissolve, re-establish, and dissolve again, almost week to week.
Other things had changed, too. We had lost the opportunity to connect in casual, personal ways—no chance meetings on the paths near our building, no sitting together at lunch. To remedy that, we became intentional about our silliness. We played online cribbage (it’s really hard to teach those rules via Zoom), participated in a multi-week “best tasting Oreo flavor” bracket (I never knew I could hate the smell of Oreos), and added a new agenda item to our weekly meeting: the Wildlife Update.
If you have to be confined to the same house for weeks or months, New England is a pretty nice place to be confined. Our yards have a special ability to harbor wild creatures, no matter how suburban they are. (Or even urban! Have you seen the story about wild turkeys in Woburn, Massachusetts?) Especially at night when traffic slows, my yard is visited by all manner of beasts. What I’m saying is: you can see a lot just by looking out your window here, if you find yourself with a lot of extra window time.
And my team did. Almost to a person, we had created home offices in our kitchens and porches and guest rooms, near windows overlooking our yards. During those lockdown weeks, the streets were eerily reminiscent of the airspace after 9/11; cars simply had nowhere to go, even in the daytime. With the volume of humanity turned down, animals all over the world became more bold. Each week my team compared field notes and congratulated the person who’d had the best sighting. One colleague had a herd of deer take over his neighborhood; another watched a flock of turkeys roost in her trees each night. For my part, I was thrilled to see our pileated woodpecker return, and to have a red-bellied woodpecker visit the feeder outside my office window for almost a week straight (I’d never seen one in person—gorgeous!). When I walked laps around my house, instead of traffic, I listened to birdsong and tree frogs.
Eventually the world’s gears seemed to come unstuck, for better or worse. Things got busy. Our work agendas filled back up, but the Wildlife Update continued to lead off our weekly meeting.
I’ve stayed more mindful of my immediate environment, in a way that I think I’d forgotten over the past few decades. Sadly, along with that consciousness has come a growing certainty that, as a species on a global scale, we’re humanspreading. Perhaps this is pessimism from all the news about severe weather, or endangered monarch butterflies, or the bee decline. Maybe I just wonder what else I’d see and hear in my yard if we all claimed a little bit less space.
Nevertheless, I can report that this weekend was superb for Wildlife Updates, with several unexpected visitors. I watched a pair of bear cubs climb our trees, heard barred owls calling to each other in the dusk, and repeatedly chased the woodchuck out of my garden. This morning, we discovered that Covid had also paid our household a visit, bringing with it yet another lockdown period.
Mother Nature sure has some sense of humor.
So sorry about the Covid. So happy you know how to make the most of what comes your way. But still sorry. If you were the one chasing the woodchucks then maybe you are not the one with the virus? Speedy recoveries.
Thank you for the Woburn shout-out! Love the idea of a Wildlife Update to kick off work meetings.