(This is the third in a series of three articles)

I hear the not-very-loud screeching before I see anything. It's the rustling of leaves that gives away the big male red-bellied woodpecker. In my binocs, he's handsome; his black and white ladder-back is clean, free of any marks from entering and leaving a tree hole and his orange/red head is smooth as suede. Yesterday he swooped in. Today he's foraging the tree's branches for insects. I move a step for a better view. He knows I'm here. I pause to adjust my binocs and the woodpecker leaves without a trace; the woods swallow him. No sense in marking the spot. I will hear him before I see him here again. He's getting used to me now.

Part of the game of cat and mouse in birding, where the roles aren't fixed, is listening for faint calls and watching for the flutter of small bodies with trees thick with foliage hide. Birds, however, are likely to hear and see you long before you see or hear them. Some will take flight while others will stay in view. In either case you can learn, as I did this autumn, something of the personalities of birds backed by one of nature's most theatrical settings, peak fall foliage on the Greenbelt Trail.

Mourning doves are somewhat reclusive. Coming along the trail, I disturb some, at the wide base of an uphill part of the trail. They hear me coming and all I see is a dozen of them fanning out into the air, in a wide V like light purple-hued fireworks, wings bleating as they make their way high into the recesses of trees. One afternoon walking along a bend in the trail I scattered some birds, one a lone mourning dove, flew into a tree. Its purple-hued body was visible but its head was almost completely hidden by the limb, on which it perched. What stared at me was an eye wreathed in a white ring. Soon a falling leaf hit me in the eye temporarily suspending the game of cat and mouse; the eyes had it.

Robins, on the other hand, have sweet dispositions. One afternoon two of them flew onto tree branches like kamikaze pilots. Once there however, they joined numerous others in making soothing, peeping sounds, flying from tree to tree, branch to branch, like teenagers at a Friday night high school dance. One, its plumage changing, had a light rust belly, which looked like a speckled salmon. Another had a white eye ring and its wing feathers looked like delicately carved light rust wood, standing out against its dark brown back.

Crows are big, black and don't care if you see them. A dozen or so fly with splayed wings into the treetops above a hill near the LIRR tracks at Cold Spring Harbor. They sit in the tree cawing loudly. This is the largest number of crows that I've seen in one place for a few years; since West Nile Virus appeared they started to disappear. I look at the profile of one with its big thick bill and silently say, "you're a beauty!"

Another day I saw the flutter and then the partially obfuscated form of a red male cardinal; my prize. Whoever wrote that the time and tide wait for no man never tried watching cardinals in the wild. They fly fast and don't pose. One afternoon walking in the woods with my wife, I whispered to her, "Look," and point to a branch, "it's a female cardinal." Putting binoculars on it, what I thought was a bird is actually a dark tan leaf with the reddish glow of the sun's late afternoon light on its side, giving it the shape and look of a female cardinal. Now I stand, quiet as a church mouse, looking at the dense scrub into which the male disappeared.

This bird is no mirage in the afternoon sun; its bill is thick and bright, its demeanor placid. From ten yards away its coal black eye focuses on me. The eye of a wild bird focused on me, and my eyes on it, is a rare moment. Neither of us moves. There's no one here but you and me babe, and I can't fly, so what's your next move? There's a slight shake and shutter. That's it, he's going to fly. And he does, but only to a higher branch. The feathers on its hind parts look like brown parquet wooden pieces, as the bird pecks around soon disappearing through the limbs of the scrub, oblivious of me. While the cardinal was there, with red holly berries and green vegetation around it, the whole scene smacked of Christmas in October.

Some other birds you may see this time of year are white-throated sparrows that are now going into their winter plumage. Look for the white patch on the bird's throat. Their white throats are somewhat dirty and the stripes on their heads are light cocoa colored on top and in the back and yellow in front. One afternoon I silently watched some on the wooden foot rails of an uphill part of the trail. Stalker and the stalked. While I wouldn't call them as viewer friendly as the robins, they offered a decent look before they flew off.

One day I got a good view of what I thought was a warbler that had a whitish eye circle. I carefully drew a diagram of its colors. Upon looking it up later the little bird turned out to be not a warbler but a white-eyed vireo. A coup for me as this was the first time I'd seen this little bird.

Humans and birds aren't the only ones playing cat and mouse. Snake Hill, which I so named, is a steep leaf covered hill, part of the bike - not hiking path, on which I scared up a brown snake with two yellow stripes. It looked straight ahead, away from me, while my eyes wouldn't leave it. Just then my cell phone rang, surprising me and probably the snake as well. After answering the phone the snake was nowhere in sight. It may have decided that the neighborhood was becoming too noisy and moved to a less accessible portion of the trail. Afterwards the sun came out and the breeze picked up sending down some big leaves like the first flakes in a snowstorm. I moved on.

You never know what's around the next bend in the trail. Maybe a vole will suddenly shoot across leaves and disappear soundlessly into the ground to avoid the red-tailed hawk, which I got only a fleeting glimpse of a while ago, as it slowly came off its perch after hearing my approaching footsteps. It's all part of the game where the roles of cat and mouse are always shifting.