I knew I was overlooking something in the previous post — the one about concepts/events that do not occur in Abu Dhabi.

And that one was … birds.

It’s related to the lack of music. Birds singing. Or chirping. Or cooing. Or squawking, even.

This has to be another environmental thing. The extreme heat in the summer has to be hard on birds, and the relative lack of vegetation is, too.

A solitary pigeon sometimes perches on the rail of our balcony. The pigeons here look like pigeons everywhere, in terms of coloring (usually gray), but they are markedly smaller. About the size of, say, a bluebird.

We see the occasional sparrow-like bird. And I have heard reports of a colored bird (bright yellow markings on its head) near the office.

And at night, smallish heron-like birds with long stick-like legs will land on grassy areas, perhaps looking for worms.

But overall … not many birds. Not really. No flocks, certainly. No piping. No singing.

The country is known for the falcon, prized as a hunting bird by the royals here, but I have never seen one flying free, soaring, floating a few hundred feet up, looking for prey.

The UAE also is known for the Arabian bustard, which is under some threat here because of predation by falcons, among other factors. Every now and then, we at The National do a story about bustards being raised by humans and then released into the wild.

One upside to a lack of birds is the lack of bird excrement. You are unlikely to find something nasty on the windshield of your car. Furniture left outside will not be assaulted by defecating birds. There’s that.

But I would trade some annoyance, I think, for the mindless yet cheerful music of birds. Another Silent Spring is almost here, but I think springs have been pretty much silent here for centuries.

Aside from the pigeon, just now, the last bird I saw was in a barbership, a parakeet in a cage. If I thought about it long enough, I might feel bad for the caged bird, but at that moment it actually cheered me up — a colorful bird chirping mindlessly.