Have you heard the Nina Simone song, Feeling Good? I was listening to it while writing this blog.
Birds flying high, you know how I feel
Sun in the sky, you know how I feel
Breeze driftin' on by, you know how I feel
It's a new dawn
It's a new day
It's a new life for me, yeah
And I'm feeling good!
Photo byMiguel Á. PadriñánfromPexels
Well not yet, we aren’t feeling good. But, we are hearing well aren’t we?
Been reading a lot of articles on the dolphin & swan sightings in Venice (how I wish they were real!), the sparrows & parrots here in Mumbai. They have reclaimed their spaces scream the headlines.
Yes, these days we have the koyals waking us up at 6. 00 am, because we probably don’t keep alarms. We hear them since there are no vehicles outside. Turtles are out for their mass nesting without any disturbance & so are the crocodiles on the beach! My friends in Gurgaon are far luckier, they boast about talabs and small lakes. Delhi NCR is known to be one of the cities in world having a large variety of birds. So, I won’t dismiss their claims of seeing a peacock dance as a mirage!!
What if all of these were always there, behind the smoke screen called modern life. Yes, quite a few of them migrated from cities choosing to breathe easy unlike us humans and as soon as they saw the satellite images showing that air has cleared over the cities, they came back! (Of course, birds have been using more advanced GPS and satellite system than Google for centuries!!) Though their population has declined in the city over the years, their sightings have increased over the last 2 weeks.
Maybe they never migrated away or came back or reclaimed their spaces. Maybe, we ignored their existence, they were always around, they tweeted more than the twitter, but our interests were different. While we were curating our feeds based on our interests, the real tweets were silenced. Most of the birds, especially sparrows cross pollinate plants and help farmers by eating insects harmful to plants. That’s like being an Entertainer & a Farmer at the same time!
As humans we are attracted to happy people. We seek happy faces, it helps us deal with our daily battles. In this isolation, where we haven’t even seen our neighbors for more than 2 weeks, the only visitors we have are these birds and they are happier & chirpier. Our collective illusions of seeing dolphins along sea fronts in the city may or may not be true, but these real birds are messengers. Listening to them makes me wonder of all the little things that we miss out on. (Did I sound like my grandfather?) They chirp to alert other birds about danger. If we pick up their language, who knows we can even get early warnings about nature and impending disasters before our systems process data!
But what happens when the lockdown is over? Once we are back to our routine, will we still acknowledge their presence? When they fly in to our balconies and wish us good morning with their tweets, will we be busy with our phone tweets? Knowing us humans, we will probably will return to our ways.
My windows currently have nets to prevent birds from entering the house. Yet, they find nooks and corners to sneak in, build nests and lay eggs making themselves at home. Acknowledging them has its practical challenges, but I am exploring ways in which they can become a part of our daily lives. What do we do to make these big little things a small part of our lives?
Tweet your suggestions on my window sill @St_Reji !
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