Meteorologists used to puzzle when, on certain fall nights, radar indicated vast storms rising out of nowhere — storms that didn’t exist. If you got under one, climbed up on a roof, and looked, you wouldn’t see or hear anything except the clear autumn stars, and sometimes, the faint chirps of sparrows and warblers and thrushes from hundreds of feet up in the night sky.

Tunnel vision is awful easy to acquire. Just go out in the wild and look for something specific. All around you, the critters you AREN’T looking for will sit in plain sight, probably laughing.

The local Vaux’s Swifts are tiny, soot-colored birds that live mostly in the air. They nest in trees and chimneys, sticking three-inch nests of twigs together with saliva. They don’t bother with territories and may build multiple nests in the same tree.

Epic arguments between a house wren and a big gopher snake once woke me up at dawn, when the reptile tried to snitch eggs from the little wooden nestbox outside my childhood bedroom window.

I just saw a Stellar’s Jay — a lovely rascal, ocean blue and iridescent with a sweeping black crest — carefully inspecting my paper birch tree…