DO birds spread the coronavirus? This is a crucial question and if there isn’t a team of Harvard scientists working on it, I would be shocked and dismayed.

I was thinking about this question yesterday after reading the touching comments of a reader who braved the New Normal to go birdwatching. Personally, I would say that chickadees, blue jays, wrens, cardinals and many others, as adorable as they can be, are definitely super-spreaders since they go about breathing the open air and some of that air, at least until Comrade Biden implements the national mask mandate enforceable with jail terms, must contain germs.

Birds are not locked down. Not yet.

Until they are confined to their nests, those of us foolishly willing to risk death from a virus with a greater than 99 percent survival rate should take advantage of this opportunity.

Enjoy birds. They are everywhere. They are free for the watching. They can fill the days of Home Aloners — those who no longer go to the office and are slowly losing their minds in between Zoom calls — with the small, innocent pleasures. A dictatorial consensus exists among world leaders that small pleasures must be destroyed, the sooner the better. But they are going to have a hard time rounding up all the birds, not that I would for a minute put that past them either.

Did I ever tell you about the time my younger son and I were talking about the Baltimore Orioles then nesting in our yard? We were standing in the kitchen chatting about how beautiful their calls were when there was a loud knock at the glass front door. Guess who it was? One of the Orioles. I kid you not. He was standing on the ground and knocking with his beak. He clearly appreciated the compliments and wanted in. Later he knocked at one of the windows. You see? Birds have a social streak, and it’s going to take a lot to control it. They’re just not used to being bossed around by petty tyrants and we can learn something from their love of freedom. We can at least rejoice when we see a hawk soaring overhead or a flock of crows noisily traveling together or ducks swimming less than six feet apart in the chilly waters of early winter that they have more freedom of movement than we do.

A reader highly recommends the videos of Lesley the Bird Nerd, who even has birds eat out of her hands. Lesley cured a case of depression with birdwatching. Maybe you can too!!

God lovingly gave us birds as companions of sorts. They do things we can’t do and we do things they can’t do. You almost never see a dead bird. When they die, they go off and do it discreetly, as if to spare us the news of their mortality. We can learn from each other and share our mutual journeys, traveling through this crazy world, wing to wing. That reminds me of the beautiful poem “Master Speed” by Robert Frost, in which he speaks of life as the movement of flying and compares a married couple to a pair of birds:

No speed of wind or water rushing by
But you have speed far greater. You can climb
Back up a stream of radiance to the sky,
And back through history up the stream of time.
And you were given this swiftness, not for haste
Nor chiefly that you may go where you will,
But in the rush of everything to waste,
That you may have the power of standing still —
Off any still or moving thing you say.
Two such as you with such a master speed
Cannot be parted nor be swept away
From one another once you are agreed
That life is only life forevermore
Together wing to wing and oar to oar.

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