We are fortunate on this Fourth of July weekend to be able to spend it on the shore of a peaceful Maine lake. As we write this from the open-air deck, the contrast from the busy sounds of the hustle and bustle of cars and people in town when we left, to now hearing instead the sound of water lapping against the shore and the gentle wind rustling the leaves is rejuvenating.

Moments ago, a belted kingfisher darted in low over the water against the backdrop of the shore across the little cove from us. A glance through the binoculars at it, with its big, shaggy crested head sitting on an exposed limb over the water, revealed its reddish-brown breast band below the blue one. Only the females have that feature. Was this female looking for food for its young, we wondered? Where might it be nesting? Kingfishers have rather specialized nesting requirements, building their nests in burrows dug into dirt or sand banks.

A steady stream of common grackles - black birds with relatively long tails that call with a dull “clack” - have been coming and going below the blue sky in front of the camp throughout the afternoon. We have more questions. Are they frequenting a particularly good feeding area and traveling back and forth to a nesting area? We did see one clearly carrying food across several hundred yards of open lake to get to the other shore. But many of them don’t seem to be carrying food, and we suspect that some of them may be recently fledged young birds following mom or dad.

The songs of certain birds remind us quickly of our setting. Yes, the loud cries of common loons are certainly the most obvious. We expect that as night falls, their haunting yodels will echo loudly all around us. As we wake up to their mesmerizing calls, we’ll quickly remember we are sleeping on the shores of a Maine lake.

Sweeping up from the lakeshore lies a thick, green forest of tall red oaks, red maples, and white pine interspersed with hemlock, white birch, and other trees. As we stepped from the car upon arrival, there was the piercing “pee-a-wee, pee-ur” of an eastern wood-pewee ringing out from the canopy. That’s a signature species of such woodlands, a bird that journeys north from northern South America to raise its young quickly in its brief summer stay here before making its way south again. Red-eyed vireos, the birds we affectionally call “preacher birds,” love this kind of forest as well. We can hear them singing their sing-song “here-I-am, look-at-me, see-me” from all directions. Even as other birds quiet during the heat of the afternoon and as dusk approaches, the red-eyed vireos continue to sing with conviction.

From the depths of the pine trees we can hear the liquid trills of pine warblers. If we trekked out to try to see one, we would find a small, humbly colored bird with an olive-green back and yellow throat hopping among the green pine needles, searching for insects in between bouts of song.

The hemlocks and occasional spruce trees here harbor another conifer-loving warbler, the black-throated green warbler. Their song stands out: a bright, high, buzzy “zee-zee-zee-zoo-zee” or “zoo-zee-zoo-zoo-zee.” They look pretty snazzy, too, with a bright yellow face set against a black throat.

What birds will we see next, and what wonderful mysteries will they place in front of us to ponder? What a glorious way to spend the Fourth of July weekend!

Jeffrey V. Wells, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Vice President of Boreal Conservation for National Audubon. Dr. Wells is one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists. He is a coauthor of the seminal “Birds of Maine” book and author of the “Birder’s Conservation Handbook.” His grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for many years. Allison Childs Wells, formerly of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a senior director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, a nonprofit membership organization working statewide to protect the nature of Maine. Both are widely published natural history writers and are the authors of the popular books, “Maine’s Favorite Birds” (Tilbury House) and “Birds of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao: A Site and Field Guide,” (Cornell University Press).