‘Papageno, that’s my name, catching birds, that’s my game’. As Papageno introduces himself in Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’, we are invited – not to catch – but to observe the birds in our own backyard. In the winter of 2020, for the first time in many years, I don’t have to go in to work. So, I watch the sun in its short path across the sky and I watch the birds that have chosen to winter in the field outside our home. This land, cultivated part of the year, and flooded during the rest, has escaped the hatchet of urbanization. Here in the wintertime, as I first learned in 2020, a number of birds show up – a few dozen egrets, a handful of ducks and half a dozen cranes. I fish out an old pair of binoculars. The ducks swim in and out of the wetland reeds. The egrets settle at the edges. The cranes are huge and when I watch them fly close, they look primitive. I imagine myself in a younger, warmer, wetter world, staring at the creatures that dominated those skies, destined to be the dino