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In the time of coronavirus

A collection of stories submitted by the public on their experience of living through the time of the Coronavirus pandemic.
We are now safely through the first phase of response to coronavirus in New Zealand and people are reflecting on what this major and previously unimaginable global catastrophe has meant for us, as individuals, in the 21st century. Globally the losses and the scale of human suffering have been very great. This forum offers a space to reflect upon the experience and to consider questions such as: What are we learning from the pandemic? What might we need to remember and preserve? Through the alert levels our prime minister said repeatedly, ‘Stay safe, be kind.’ What was your experience, what did you observe, what mattered and how might we re-imagine a better direction going forward? If you would like to contribute to the re-collective effort please send me your reflections, observations, journal entries, stories to my contact page... just a page of A4 writing, with a title and a brief bio and they will be added to the repository of important writings flowering in this space.

The search for knowledge is.. an exercise in reminiscence, that is, an effort to recall and recollect that which we once knew.

Ahsivai Margalit quoted in Richard Horton, “The Ethics of Memory,” The Lancet, 6 June 2020

Strange days have found us by Keith Woodley

11/8/2020

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Keith Woodley has been resident manager at the Pūkorokoro Miranda Shorebird Centre for 27 years. He is the author of Godwits: Long-haul champions and Shorebirds of New Zealand: Sharing the margins.
 
What pandemic? The weather was benign. Across the paddocks to the north west, the bulky Hunua Ranges under a cloudless sky: across the bay to the east, the ridges of the Coromandel. A wheeling harrier overhead, and above the shoreline flocks of oystercatchers commuting to their high tide roost on the shell bank. Hard to countenance that, away from this idyll, the world was plunging into turmoil. 
My bubble was a big one: the Shorebird Centre and its grounds and the long strip of coastal reserve opposite. On one of my walks there were two figures in the landscape, about half a kilometre away. Just two weeks earlier, it had been common enough as people used the trail system between the bird hides. Now the first thought, though fleeting: who are these intruders into my space?

Familiar features were encountered in a new context. The pukekos normally resident around the pond and wider centre grounds, were now fossicking at the front steps. A white-faced heron took to standing on the deck peering in through the ranch slider. This I took to be neighbourhood watch.
Quite new was the scene at the eastern end of the Kopu bridge outside Thames. Trips to the supermarket were once routine, almost unthinking exercises. Three weeks into Level Four my return home was interrupted by a police checkpoint. The middle-aged constable leaning in through the window asking the purpose of my journey was certainly novel.

On Thursday April 2, a friend called.  ‘Commiserations’, she said. “For what?’ “The Listener, it is gone.’ I was a long-time subscriber but said I would only miss some of it. In recent months I was probably reading only one in four cover stories. There were, however, columnists I would certainly miss: Jane Clifton and anything by Paul Thomas. But it was a sudden death in the age of Covid. So was losing songwriter John Prine who had been part of my soundtrack since the 1970s. The concert in Auckland early last year now assumed enormous significance.

There was also a question of latitude. Diurnal cues – changing day-length – trigger hormonal changes that prompt a migratory bird to complete its moult, store fuel, and migrate. By the second half of April birds from New Zealand, bound for the Arctic, are refuelling along the coasts of China and Korea. Since 2015 that is where I have been at this time, counting shorebirds in North Korea. Now I am on the wrong side of the equator: thus, Anzac Day at home for the first time in five years.
​
But there was uplifting news of normal systems still functioning. Several of the godwits that had been fitted with GPS tags at Pūkorokoro in November, were now refuelling on the shores of the Yellow Sea. By Level Two, they were at breeding sites in Alaska. Even better was news of some particularly special red knots. These small shorebirds specialise in eating tiny shellfish. A few dozen birds had been affected by a suspected toxic algal bloom in February.  After two weeks recovery at rehabilitation centres, they were fitted with coded leg flags and released. That this happened on the eve of their normal migration departure for eastern Russia suggested they would be behind in their preparations and would remain here for the winter. But there was to be no lockdown for them. They too were seen in China.
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Copyright © 2017 Deborah Shepard
  • Home
  • Books
    • The Writing Life >
      • Reviews & Interviews
    • Giving Yourself to Life
    • Her Life's Work
    • Translucence
    • Between The Lives
    • Reframing Women
    • Tributes
    • Personal Writings >
      • Lockdown Journal
      • Travel Journal
      • Elegy for a friend
      • Christchurch - Post Quakes
      • On a residency
      • Deborah’s Love Letter to the Women’s Bookshop
      • Deborah's Q & A With Unity Books
  • Writing Memoir
    • Defining Memoir
    • The Participatory Model
    • Tips on Writing and Posting a Story
    • The Value of a Writing Class
    • From writing course to book publication
    • Your Writing Space
    • Writing on a Theme >
      • Window
      • Surviving a Crisis
    • Reviews of Memoir
  • Writers' stories
    • Covid-19 Stories
    • Writing Guidelines
  • Events
  • About
    • Testimonials
    • Media
  • What People Say
  • Contact