This wood road of ours, where the birds fly through, is used every school-day morning by our children on their way to catch the bus. It is a kind of open line through change. It rides the side of a low ridge, and glacial hollows dip away from it. It once served as a wagon road for woodcutters, and is still shaded by the insistent, if none too “sturdy,” oaks, which come back again and again, no matter how many times they are cut. They make the road a green tunnel in summer, and their gray branches with knotted fingers rattle and sway above it in the wintertime. It receives many travelers by land and some by sea. (A few Januaries ago I found a dovekie there, a little sea bird with the black back, short black wings, and white breast of a penguin. It is one of the members of the auk family, breeding in Greenland and migrating down from the ice-locked waters of the Arctic Circle to feed in the Atlantic during the winter. Its short wings are meant for swimming, diving, and flying in and out of waves, so they are not very effective when blown inland by a storm. The dovekie I found was unable to take off, and in any case weak and hungry. So after a futile effort to feed it, I took it back to Cape Cod Bay, where it started to fly along the surface of the water, though weakly, in short, floundering dashes.) With a half mile of concentrated road it is easier to take cognizance of friends and strangers than when you are trying to make California on the transcontinental highway. You can see how it is used by skunk, squirrel, deer, and the hunters of deer. I walk it in expectation. One of the animals that constantly move across the road and live in the woods beside it is that bird which looks like a tiny thrush but is classified as a wood warbler, the oven bird. Its “Teacher! Teacher!” rings out in spring and early summer. It was named after its leaf-hidden nest, made on the ground, with a hole going in at the side like a Dutch oven. Here is an oven bird, tail bobbing slightly, perched on the lower branches of a red maple beside the road ... a little more out in the open than usual, less concentrated on its earlier nesting territory. It flutters down to the road. This is one of those birds that have the distinction, if that is what it is, of being able to walk, rather than hop or run. So it starts walking, through the dappled shadows on the road, as I keep a respectable distance behind it. Or perhaps I walk and it attends to business. The oven bird goes back and forth, pecking insects, with a quick meandering, interrupted by an occasional little jump at the leaves of an overhanging shrub or plant. This is not a straight walker, no Indian with a destination, but its body moves constantly from left to right in purposeful flexibility.