September 14, 2020

I love spending time in my back yard.  I love simple photography, capturing nature in all of it's unexpected twists and turns.

Over the past several years I have come to expect a certain "usual" response by the birds and squirrels and groundhogs when I would walk slowly to my back yard to see what's going on........SCRAMBLE......FLY......RUN......"WE'RE OUTTA HERE".....

But recently, several months since Covid, I have noticed a distinctive change in the instinctive responses of my back yard friends.

Because of the increased daily presence of me and my neighbours nature has progressively become more TOLERANT of my presence.

It's amazing, and REALLY interesting!

The animals have slowly come to realize that "we're not as much of a threat as they thought we were".  When I walk to my back yard, they are a little "less" prone to think I'm coming to threaten them, and a little "more" prone to see me as just a harmless presence.

A few days ago, I noticed a dead sparrow perched on my back yard feeder.  I did not disturb the body.  I proceeded to go ahead and cut the grass as I had planned...loudly coming within  inches of the bird's clutched body on the feeder....and I was totally sure that it was deceased.

However, a few minutes later, the bird was awake and had it's beak pressed into the feeder making a run at as many seeds as it could....I was really surprised.

The point is that 7-months prior, if a bird had been sleeping on my feeder and I started cutting the grass and making noise etc...it definitely would have "scattered" immediately.

I believe that this experience is an example of how nature has built somewhat of a tolerance to our presence, and that this bird, during it's "down time",,,,,it's "sleep". was only hearing sounds that it had heard hundreds of times over the past few months, and was simply UNPHASED.....lawn mowers, screeching weed eaters, BBQ festivities and loud sounds are now mainstream to back yard nature, and back yard nature has simply adjusted accordingly.