stared at the water as I have often looked

stared at the water as I have often looked at the ocean — transfixed.

For many hours I sat happy and tense in the blind behind a tripod supporting a camera with telephoto lens. The lens drew the birds so close they filled the view finder. There were electronic flashes connected to the camera by cords; more light was essential as shade was dense under the dogwood tree.

It was late in September and well into October that wood thrushes came to the pool. Suddenly they were there. Rarely did I see them approach in great springing hops over the wood’s floor. They drank and bathed and fought with each other for time in the water.

The wood thrushes that paused at my shallow pool were on their way to spend the winter in Mexico and Central America. One day the woods were full of brown birds. The next day they were gone. At dusk they mounted to the sky and flew to the tropical forests, now disappearing. During our winter, the wood thrush silently searched for insects in the leaf litter of the floor of the rich and diverse tropical forests.

In April, the birds returned, appearing as mysteriously as they departed. It is after a week or so of silence that the birds begin to embellish the woods with calm bell-like notes. The male announced himself to returning females; he told her of the big trees sheltering the smaller ones — dogwoods, viburnums and redbud — that she preferred for her robin-like, mud nest. The song announced a forest floor in which spiders, caterpillars, millipedes, and earthworms hide. It only takes a bit of leaf tossing, he said to the female, to uncover the delicacies.

The song of the wood thrush also warned others of his kind to stay out of his bit of swampy woodland. “This is for me and my mate,” he sang, “And for the speckled young that will hatch from the blue eggs she will lay.” lb my ears, the song was all calm and tranquility; to another wood thrush it was a statement of imminent battle should he