When it came to Nature, Henry David Thoreau, who made Walden the most famous pond in America, was a voyeur. You only need sit still in a good location, he once said, and all Nature will exhibit itself to you by turns.

I decided to take advantage of the seven-day heat wave predicted to begin Monday, July 18, to plant myself in a chair overlooking the birdbath in my pompously titled “Gallagher’s Greenwich Street Garden” and see what I could see.

It was a good bet that during a heat wave my watering hole would be as busy as a Beltzville beach on the 4th of July.

Here’s some of what my backyard slice of avian nature revealed to me.

Day one, 90 degrees: A portrait-worthy starling on the rim of the pool tilted its head back after taking a sip, as if savoring the cooling draft of water before swallowing and only then beelining skyward. You could almost hear the “Ahhh.”

Day two, 93 degrees: as if enacting a sacred rite of homage to the life-giving water, a sparrow bent down, took a sip of water, moved two steps counter-clockwise, bent down, took a sip, once more moved two steps counter-clockwise, bent down, took another sip, and continued that “dance” till it had traveled the entire circumference of the pool and returned from whence it started.

Day three, 93 degrees: A large starling performing its exuberant ablutions was ringed by six or eight impatient smaller sparrows and finches perched on the rim of the pool, but facing outward with their backs to the starling as if sensitive to the decorum owed to one in the intimacy of one’s own bath and respecting the starling’s right to privacy.

Day four, 95 degrees: A large starling was again roiling the pool with its whirling aquatic gyrations. But unlike yesterday, the winged witnesses were facing inward, shuffling agitatedly from one foot to the other, more in anger now than impatience. The starling was not to be rushed and vigorously swatted at the smaller birds, who bobbed up and down like puppets on a string as they rebounded from or dodged the starling’s blows.

Day five, 95 degrees: Two starlings, a cozy couple, attentions fixed on each other rather than bathing, slowly circling each other, were visited by a third, who was invited to join in an evolving and revolving dance of starling bodies having nothing to do with cooling off, but which resembled nothing more certainly than a menage a trois. Hot bodies in a hot week.

Day six, 97 degrees: Gunfight on Greenwich Street. A starling, a finch and a dove stared each other down for a long time like Blondie, Tuco and Angel Eyes in the penultimate scene in Clint Eastwood’s classic western, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” – the longest showdown in western film history. Ironically, it was the dove, our symbol of peace and love, puffing itself up to intimidate the others, that finally made the first move to claim possession of the pool.

Day seven, 100 degrees: In what resembled a senseless brawl in a biker bar, six, seven, eight black-clad motorcycle gang look-alike starlings engaged in a battle royale. It was every bird for itself; last one standing the winner. The champion claimed a virtually waterless pool padded with feathers like detached limbs – a pool now polluted, a pool now not worth the having.

Thoreau was scientist as well as voyeur. He measured the ice depth in Walden Pond; he documented the day that berries bloomed from spring to spring. One cannot help but note that at the onslaught of the heat wave, the social contract of avian life at the Gallagher watering hole crumbled as the week trod without mercy to its torrid 100-degree climax. Community is fragile, even among the birds. There’s a lesson there.

But, above all else, I was blessed with visions that week. I saw some things I know I’ll never see again and that perhaps no one else has seen. Sights just for me. That was magical.