Well, I got up to Ithaca a week or two back. It’s a place I sometimes go when I need some quiet by myself, which is sort of a surprise, as it’s actually a very busy place.

*But I started my visit at one of the quietest places in or around Ithaca, namely Sapsucker Woods. Birders world-wide know the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which blends extremely scholarly research with resources for the backyard birder. I’ve taken part in some of their “citizen science” programs, where ordinary people use their observations to contribute to scientific study.

*I came for the woods and the trails, for the Cornell Lab maintains a (mostly wooded) 230-acre sanctuary called Sapsucker Woods. With binoculars around my neck I wandered the trails, stopping to spot the birds but mostly working on the brooding for which I’d come. Just being in the woods works wonders for me, and there are trails here that I’ve never even seen.

*Something else I’ve never seen here, to be honest, is a sapsucker. But I do run across other woodpeckers, and one of them was drumming quite close as I wandered by. I saw a yellow warbler, and even came across a couple of wood thrushes. I felt good about this because I see them so seldom nowadays, acid rain and habitat destruction having wiped out fifty per cent in fifty years.

*In the pond I spot a number of great blue herons, and a bewildering being seeming to glide along the surface without any activity for propulsion… until a head breaks the surface, and I realize with a laugh that it’s a submerged muskrat carrying a clump of reeds.

*Around the feeding station (and elsewhere) are cardinals, starlings, robins, goldfinches, mourning doves, and red-wing blackbirds. Squirrels and chipmunks zip in and out from under cover, while butterflies, moths, and damselflies flit along on the missions peculiar to their kinds.

*You can enjoy the trails on your own… they’ll even lend you binoculars… or there are activities and guided walks from time to time. Inside the center you can sit by thirty feet of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the pond (lately covered with lilypads) and the feeders.

*Whenever the space is open I like to look at the wildlife murals and painting of Louis Agassiz Fuertes. Named for a great naturalist, Fuertes became a great nature artist, and his works are always wonders. Although born much later (1874, in Ithaca), he was in many ways a successor to Audubon.

*There are also two new murals, each covering a two-story interior wall. I instantly spotted what James Prosek was doing – echoing the endsheets of the groundbreaking 1934 Field Guide to the Birds, by Roger Tory Peterson. Both artists rendered the birds in their typical settings, all in black silhouette. For those of us of a certain age, such silhouettes seem as real as the birds themselves. They conjure up wintry days spent poring over those endsheets, hankering for the birds to come back again.

*Facing this is a marvelous world map by Jane Kim, depicting one representative of all 423 living families of bird in a location at which that bird is normally found – life size! The seven-foot ostrich, the five-foot cassowary, and the wandering albatross with its 10-foot wingspan all adorn more than 3000 square feet of mural, along with much smaller birds far more prosaic to us. But ghostly images show other families that have gone extinct, some in historic times.

*Anyhow, the Cornell Lab is a jewel of our Finger Lakes region – it’s even got its own Wild Birds Unlimited store. On my way out, a deer sauntered across the road in front of me. Great place.