A Home in the Forest 231 



the under side of a branch like a Black-and-White Creeper, while a third ex- 

 plored a small branch like a Nuthatch. But, though they allowed themselves 

 a certain amount of latitude in hunting methods, there were unwritten laws 

 that no good Creeper could transgress. A Bluebird would have perched on 

 the broken-off thumbs of branches on the tree trunks, but no adult Creeper 

 was ever seen on one of them. The old birds generally went about their 

 business very soberly, but I once caught them chasing each other around a 

 tree trunk and tilting off pell-mell through the piazza of the log cabin. 



One morning, when the young were still very small and the parents were 

 feeding slowly — perhaps only four times in half an hour — I had abundant time 

 to look around. The stillness of morning was in the timber. Blue sky showed 

 through between the higher reaches of the lofty boles which, as I looked to- 

 ward the sun, stood gray, unlit. The sun was in the tree tops. Not a breath 

 stirred. Only here and there the shadow of a solitary trunk was projected over 

 the ground, only here and there a sunbeam strayed through, touching up a 

 cobweb, a clump of ferns, or a branch of evergreen in its path; another time 

 a pair of large yellow butterflies wavered through a sunbeam. In the under- 

 brush a pine squirrel rattled the deciduous leaves near the ground and, as it 

 climbed, the sunny green bushes moved. A Junco flew up on the roof of the 

 log cabin, and its family with small tsips and flashes of white outer tail feathers 

 rose at my feet. A gentle voiced Western Flycatcher, apparently feeding young, 

 called from the green undergrowth beyond, and a musical Russet-backed 

 Thrush sang softly in the dark timber, whfle through the still solemn forest 

 growing softly hazy came the sweet iterations of the Nuthatch. 



A few days after the nest had been discovered, about the middle of July, 

 the voices of the young began to be heard — shrill little piping voices almost 

 like the shrilling of insects, that not only greeted the parents when they came 

 but followed them insistently when they went. 



By this time, without remonstrance from above, I could sit so near the tree 

 that I heard not only the feet of the parent on the bark when it came and the 

 scratching of its claws as it slid over the edge of the crack, but also the small 

 flit of its wings as it flew off. And now the old birds, as if they had gleaned 

 from all the nearer trees, quite often flew off through the piazza, disappearing 

 around the corner of the cabin. 



Three days after the first voices were heard, I noticed that they sounded 

 louder and stronger, as if the nestlings were gaining rapidly. The parents 

 were feeding at short intervals now. When I timed them early one morning, 

 they came irregularly, as insects do not present themselves to be devoured on 

 the tick of the clock. The intervals varied from one to eleven minutes. The 

 first hour the birds came thirteen times, at 8.32, 8.36, 8.43, 8.54, 8.55, 8.57, 

 9, 9.01, 9.07, 9.12, 9.14, 9.17;^, 9.23, 9.25, 9.35, 9.37, 9.40, and 9.44. During 

 the next half hour, when I had withdrawn to the piazza, they came still of tener. 

 When they had hard work finding insects, they would give a casual look over 



