Early in the afternoon of the recent solar eclipse, I was cutting back zinnias in my garden. Sparrows chirped off and on and cicadas buzzed and cardinals and crows called once in a while. A friend had called the day before. And he said he had heard that birds stopped singing in the middle of a solar eclipse as though they thought night had arrived. As the eclipse progressed, the dense honeysuckles and the high locusts that surrounded the yard took on an amber glow. It was not a vision of