The pandemic is teaching us that all is not yet lost.

None of these changes will last — the human race cannot stay cooped up indoors forever — but while we have both the time to observe and the window perch to watch from, we can use this cultural moment to rethink our relationship to wildness. We can ponder what it truly means to share the planet. We can resolve to change our lives.

I am a lifelong window gazer myself, and I work from a home full of windows even in normal times, but I have been surprised by how much more I see these days, even though very little about my own workday life, or the dead-end street where I live, has been changed by the shutdown.

Delivery trucks are still coming and going; the sounds of construction — nail guns and masonry saws, cement mixers and backhoes — still fill the air as Nashville’s relentless gentrification continues apace. But my own comings and goings have ceased, and in that stillness I see more now than I have ever seen before.

One Sunday afternoon at the very beginning of the lockdown I was working in the yard when I heard the wicka calls of two Northern flickers competing for a mate’s attention. Wicka, wicka, wicka, kikikikikikiki, the bird in my yard would call. Wicka, wicka, wicka, kikikikikikiki, a bird across the street would call back. I peered up into the trees, hoping I could see at least one of them before they took their competition to more hospitable territory.

Flickers are not endangered, but their population dropped 49 percent between 1966 and 2012, and Audubon projects that climate change will cost them much of their range in Middle Tennessee. Already I rarely see them here, and I’ve never once seen the flicker’s “fencing duel” during mating season. Here was my chance.

While I was walking around the yard, looking for the nearest bird, the two birds were looking for each other, flying from tree to tree, moving closer and closer. And then, like a tiny pandemic miracle, they both lighted on a power pole at the corner of my yard, in plain view of anyone walking down the street, and began a flicker’s version of the universal boasting match between two male creatures vying for the attention of a fertile female.