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Tumbleweeds now trundle across a desolate desert highway faster than a Singaporean getting up for a glass of water. Life for 85 percent of people here has bonked, the way ice cream plonks onto the ground after free-falling from your cone. It’s not pretty.

But nature — Coronavirus included — remains hard at work, what with all the pollination and preying and Darwining and climate changing and crazy moon phasing that needs to get done. Each day in our garden, there are at least five or six different types of birds chirping up a concerto, congregating in our sprawling mango tree and humble lawn. They fear no security hacks nor WiFi blips, and aren’t shut down after 40 minutes. In other words, they are a joy to wake up to in the morning.

Round about Valentine’s Day, a pair of bulbuls built their penthouse nest atop a tall bush in our patio, an architectural marvel of twigs waterproofed with plastic, fortified by wires, and padded with cotton. Eggs were laid and hatched, chicks were fed on demand and taught to fly off. The empty nesters stuck around, possibly because of the fruit buffet laid out for them each morning by my dad, likely because two months later, they produced a duo of new eggs in their Katong condo.

Another life cycle had begun for our adopted birds, a few days after the wheels clanged off our human ones. We discovered the eggs on Good Friday morning, early for Easter, but never too late to remind there’ll come a time for us to emerge from our (insert respective Covid-19-coping mechanism) caves.