Well it has been a while. 2020 is shaping up to be a pretty lousy year for most of us. Better for me and my family than for many, so I am thankful.
As to the virus, I think I may have had it. In March and April. I was tested in Utah at the beginning of April: negative. But I was sick through all of April in Utah and a nurse was looking after me, remotely over the phone. So who knows. My daughter, who works in a hospital may have gotten it and passed it on to me in early March. She doesn’t know if she ever had it either. She came down with something, something more mild, but was never tested. I also went to a Spring-training baseball game in Nevada in early March and had my haircut and visited the dentist in northern Utah in late February. This is the greatest level of personal ambiguity that I can remember. My symptoms were moderate. Although I lost 20 pounds without trying, I never ended up in the hospital but I thought about going a few times. I had never used an inhaler before, but now I do. Before the pandemic I always avoided reading articles about medical things, because I invariably believe myself to be manifesting whatever symptoms are mentioned. So it could all be in my head. Allergies reconsidered and overblown in the age of the virus. It would be nice to know one way or another.
The last six months, excluding April, have been about shuttling back and forth between the low desert of southern Nevada and the mountains of northern Utah. In April, I was in bed. Pretty much all of April. For the last week or so I was getting my 10,000 steps in, pacing around our place in Utah, every day, annoying the pets. By May, I was feeling better, comfortably able. But still not as I had been before. I gained the 20 pounds back, also without trying. So since early March I have had contact with almost no one who wasn’t a member of my immediate family. Contact being less than six feet apart, and none of that contact extended beyond a minute or two. This is getting old. As I said above, it would be nice to know one way or another.
The pleasant thing is that backyard living hasn’t been bad. And honestly it hasn’t been all that different. Our backyard in Nevada is extraordinary, a weird faux desert oasis. When we bought it, it came with a pond. The prior owners are a geologist and a biologist. The biologist is also an artist. She used the backyard to take photographs on which she based her paintings. They had built and then maintained the pond for twelve years. We’ve now maintained it for six. We’ve seen the critters come and go. Generations have turned over. Old coyotes replaced by young. We are on our third roadrunner. Always it is just one roadrunner at a time. There are lots of song birds: house finches, goldfinches, lesser goldfinches, a few species of sparrow, flycatchers and warblers. There are huge families of quail, pairs of ravens, mockingbirds, one triad of peregrine falcons, three generations of solitary Cooper’s hawks although when a new one arrives, this takes the form of a juvenile with an adult for a while. All too plentiful, overly plentiful, are the desert cottontail and jackrabbits. There are periodic kestrels, Merlin falcons, various tanagers and orioles, and ubiquitous cartoonish antelope ground squirrels, black and turkey vultures, dragonflies and damselflies, bees, bats and spiders, lizards, and unwanted doves, grackles, and wasps including the moderately terrifying tarantula hawk. We even had a desert tortoise once. Though we have yet to spot a rattlesnake.
I’ve spent more time in the Summer down in Nevada than usual because of numerous internet and power outages, probably related to the fires in California, the long episodes of searing heat, and the fact everyone in the world is doing many more things online. I’ve had to go down to get things running normally. The last outage took down our outside watering system for a long stretch of 110 degree F days, killed an acacia bed where quail nested, damaged several rose bushes, and unfortunately probably killed many quail and rabbits. 2020 strikes again. After a week of hot work the backyard is restored to a condition which is a little better than it was before. Sightings, so far, last week and this: a brand new young Cooper’s hawk, a kestrel, the roadrunner, three coyotes, just one jackrabbit, maybe twenty quail, a logger-head shrike, finches, sparrows and doves, antelope ground squirrels, a tarantula hawk, and a black phoebe.
Meanwhile, a very hot summer in Utah has involved a lot of closing of windows first thing in the morning and opening them just before dinner, all to collect and preserve the night-time cool mountain air. We’ve never needed air conditioning in Utah and hopefully this past summer was a bit of an anomaly. The Summer of ’94 was similar and we have had a few other Summers that were almost as hot and dry, and certainly a few that were more smokey.
Our elder daughter is spending a year or so with us, interning for a government agency remotely, given the pandemic and the shut-down of so many things. She defended her Masters thesis on the day that the national shut-down began. Thanks to her we have had backyard cinema at the fire-pit, which is pretty darn pleasant on a cool Utah mountain evening. And I don’t give Utah enough credit for wildlife. In our neighborhood, this summer, we have had golden eagles, sand-hill cranes, plenty of finches and robins, and more hummingbirds than we have ever had before. I wanted to get in a lot of hikes and some camping over the Summer. Hopefully the hikes will come with the Autumn. Between the heat and recovering from whatever I had, it was hard to hit the trails. As to camping we did have one outing to the Green River above flaming gorge. I think that for the time being I will leave the campgrounds to the many others who have had the same idea.
Recent photographs of the Southern Nevada backyard critters can be found in my photo galleries. Several of the photos are of the desert bighorn sheep taken at a local city park and are not from my backyard.
Currently I am doing a lot of video work and while at it I should get around to going live with a video page in the near future.