A Home in the Forest 



By FLORENCE MERRIAM BAILEY 



THE forest was the dense, lofty, humid coast forest extending over the 

 west slope of the Cascade Mountains in Oregon, and the home was 

 nearly sixty miles from the railroad at the end of the McKenzie River 

 stage-line. Branching off from the hot dusty stage road, a disused trail 

 crossed a narrow strip of old prairie to a deserted log-cabin with a mossy 

 roofed piazza, standing under the protecting edge of the cool, quiet forest. For 

 several rods from the cabin the underbrush had been cut back, so that you 

 looked around upon the well-spaced bare trunks of tall, green- topped spruces 

 and firs, a veritable gray brotherhood, for the lower branches had dropped off 

 as the noble trees rose toward the sky. 



Good hunting-grounds the bare boles offered the tree-trunk Creepers, and, 

 passing through the woods one morning, I heard their characteristic small 

 beady note, and discovered two of the fascinating little Sierra Creepers, 

 western half-brothers of the eastern Brown Creepers. Their mottled brown- 

 and-white backs picture their background so effectively that they would be 

 peculiarly hard to see in the shaded forest were they motionless, but you can 

 easily follow them as they rock up one tree trunk and fly down to another, 

 and sometimes you are helped out by sight of a white throat, as one looks 

 down. 



As I had been wanting for years to find a Brown Creeper's nest, I watched 

 the pair until, to my great delight, I saw one of them go down inside a crack 

 of bark — in plain sight from the piazza of the deserted cabin. What a place to 

 watch them ! How good to be called here day by day and to sit at the feet 

 of the gray brothers in the cool, quiet forest. And what a rare place for the 

 birds to make their home ! Bare trunks with mossy bark attractive to insects 

 and freedom from obstructing underbrush would seem to be the principal 

 Certhian requirements. Here the birds could not only fly back and forth 

 from bole to bole without having to dodge underbrush, but, as they slipped 

 from the nest, could fly low over the mossy — Hypnum — carpet, where fragrant 

 vanilla leaves, twin flowers, the low princess pine and other trailing vines 

 grew just high enough for a Junco to creep under, and there was an occasional 

 clump of arching ferns, a red huckleberry, or a glossy-leafed barberry to catch 

 a ray of sunlight. And while in the close background a few young flat-leafed 

 cedars and round full-needled firs caught and held the light, so generally did 

 the Creepers hunt in the circle of bare boles that it seemed worthy of note when 

 they flew back into the sunlit greenery of the enclosing underbrushed timber. 



The nest was about thirteen feet from the ground in an old Douglas spruce, 

 the bark of which was cracked from the nest down, the entrance being a narrow 

 slit, giving just room for the parents to creep in and out easily. The nest itself 

 was apparently six or eight inches deep. 



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