Autumn is almost a week old and the fall color palette is slowly filling in. Here and there single trees or even branches blaze red or orange against a muted background. Winds blow in a shifting landscape of weather.

A couple hours after the autumnal equinox, I took another walk from work. I was feeling the need to stretch my legs and think, so instead of a leisurely meander along the shore I headed out for the denser forest at the far end of the pond. The braver painted turtles craned their necks to watch me walk by.

A bevy of chipping cardinals cheered up the undergrowth of young forest along the trail. The emphatic song of a phoebe rang out over the pond, as if he were preparing to renest rather than to head south of the Mason-Dixon line. Human noise from either a radio or some sort of carnival also carried from the same direction. The distance distorted the original words and washed them of meaning.

Where the trees became older, a doe stood at the side of the trail. When I stopped, she first started toward me very purposefully before veering away. While keeping an eye on me, she picked up an oak branch bristling with large green leaves. One by one they disappeared down her gullet as the rest of the foliage shuddered. She continued into deeper brush and had left no trace by the time a middle-aged human couple passed by.

I entered the inner sanctum of the older forest and slowed. The canopy above was still vibrantly green, the color enhanced by an earlier soaking rain. The leaf litter was sparse from a summer of decomposition. Here and there were healthy patches of poison ivy, grass, and ferns just beginning to yellow. Beech drops added brush strokes of ochre. A squirrel carried an acorn across the trail and back onto the uneven forest floor. It traversed a mostly straight path, veering twice to travel the expressways provided by fallen logs.

A chipmunk crouched at the apex of a different converging highway of fallen branches. It was continuously calling “chup” in a voice that originally had me looking for a frog rather than a mammal. I disturbed it and it disappeared with a soft stream of chittering, but as I walked away I could hear the chupping resume behind me. In a few minutes I encountered another chipmunk chupping from where it perched on the edge of a beech log.

I assumed these two were males declaring territories, the pattern most familiar to me from birdwatching. Later I read that this continuous calling can function like an air raid siren warning of aerial predators. I wish I'd known to look up for hawks. Sometimes it feels like there's so much to learn, and I only sense part of the picture, distorted like the radio noise. We humans can barely even smell, yet so much mammal and even insect communication is olfactory.

I was nearing the end of my break by the time I stepped onto the boardwalk that led back to work. I passed a different middle-aged couple with binoculars pointed way up into the tree tops. At least one warbler danced a tango with branch tips as it foraged for insects. I didn't have time to identify the species or search for more, which would have been vexing if I was a true birder. For me, I saw enough for it to be evocative of fall migration in a bird sanctuary.