Sometimes life makes a columnist’s life easy by handing him something big to write about.

This week has not been one of those times.

It’s not that nothing big is happening. If nothing else, the seemingly unstoppable march to the Republican nomination by Donald Trump is the “something big” I require. I’m not in the mood for that, though, and besides the story isn’t going to go away, so it can wait.

In the meantime, I’ve found some small items that I find interesting, and I hope you’ll find them interesting, too.

A couple of weeks ago my wife spotted a pheasant in our backyard when she got up that morning. She thought that was a little strange, and so did I. After all, we bought our house in 2002, and we had never seen a pheasant in our yard before, only a few rabbits, numerous doves and finches, and a lot of neighborhood cats.

A pheasant visit would not have been surprising in 2002, since back then someone was raising a few acres of beans a little more than a block away, where a pheasant might have found a home. It would have been a short stroll from that field to our backyard. Now that field is completely covered with houses, streets and driveways, and it’s some distance to any real pheasant habitat.

Anyway we forgot about it until last Saturday. As we were preparing to leave for the basketball game, Karen spotted a pheasant — possibly the same bird — and called it to my attention. Naturally, I grabbed my camera, but by the time I made it out the door, the bird had disappeared behind the lower branches of our spruce tree. I began a careful, slow maneuver to get a glimpse of the bird while, at the same time, adjusting my camera, which was set for something quite removed from shooting birds in the backyard.

Just as I was setting the shutter speed, though, something spooked the pheasant. He emerged from the other side of the tree at a dead run and went down the alley like a shot, disappearing behind the neighbor’s fence before I could draw a bead on him with my telephoto lens. By the time I got to the alley, he was long gone.

Next time — and I hope there is a next time — I’ll do better.

Our son, who lives in the West African nation of Niger, provides the next two items by Facebook. The first is about a researcher who was studying a village in Cuba. The villagers identify themselves as Ganga, a people who live in Sierra Leone and Liberia, and the researcher videoed them dancing to songs they were singing in Banta, a nearly extinct language from West Africa.

Out of curiosity, the researcher took the recordings to Sierra Leone and played them for Ganga people there. In one village, the people knew the language and recognized the songs and the dances as their own.

Remarkably the Cuban Ganga had kept their cultural identity and handed down the songs and dances from mother to daughter for generations over two or more centuries without changing them. The songs had changed so little that when Ganga people in Sierra Leone saw the video, they recognized the Cubans as family.

The researcher, an Australian professor, returned to Africa with four of the Cuban villagers, and has made a documentary telling the story about a family of people, separated by slavery for more than two centuries, finding each other through songs. The film is called “They are We.”

Our son also provided a story about efforts to rebuild bee colonies in several countries. Those efforts had an unexpected positive side effect for farmers in Tanzania. Traditionally, Tanzanians have obtained honey by finding hives in the forest and chasing the bees out with smoke.  Unfortunately, making the smoke sometimes results in fires that destroy the hives and the bees’ habitat. Farmers are now putting hives on fences around their property so they can harvest the honey more easily and with less damage to the bees.

The side effect? When elephants arrive to raid the farmers’ crops, they come in contact with the fences and disturb the bees, who swarm out to protect their nest. It turns out elephants don’t like all that buzzing, so they run away and leave the crops alone.

Given this antipathy to bees among elephants, I wonder what would happen if somebody introduced a swarm of bees into the Republican National Convention next summer.

Finally, an acquaintance of my wife, who works at Head Start in a Wyoming community very much like Powell, provides this item. One of the children she works with is the daughter of a doctor who came to America from West Africa. Like the vast majority of people in the nation he comes from, he and his family are Muslim.

In December, the doctor approached the teacher when he came to pick up his daughter. He told her that, as Muslims, his family doesn’t observe Christmas, but he knows it is a special holiday for children and he wanted to help. He then handed her $300 to buy gifts for all the children.

I believe this man, not the terrorists, represents the majority of Muslims.