28 THE ADVENTURES OF A NATURE GUIDE 



ing with all his might. What busy, happy, ag- 

 gressive, and confiding Httle folk wrens are ! I was 

 glad when I found that Mr. and Mrs. Wren would 

 keep house for the summer in the woodpecker nest. 

 A robin was a near neighbour, nesting on the top 

 of a high, broken pine stump. Often while I lay 

 or stood watching the wrens, a camp-bird — the 

 Rocky Mountain gray jay — came to see me, plainly 

 with the hope that I would have a bite of some- 

 thing to offer. Of all the birds that I have seen, 

 none, on first sight, is so trustful of man as is the 

 camp-bird. 



That winter and the following summer I often 

 saw a tiny owl come out of the woodpeckers' old 

 nest, where a pair of owls must have been nesting, 

 I think. Anyway, for more than a year it was 

 their wooden-walled home. 



That year a pair of woodpeckers had a nest in 

 the upper end of the aspen grove. As they al- 

 lowed me to approach more closely than other 

 hairy woodpeckers, I believe they were my former 

 acquaintances whom I had watched two years 

 before. 



In the upper end of the grove another pair of 

 hairy woodpeckers had a nest, nearly twenty feet 

 above the ground, which they had evidently used 

 for three summers in succession. A short distance 

 down the brook I one day came upon an abandoned 

 woodpecker nest — probably that of a sapsucker. 

 It was not more than three feet above the ground. 



