eee ULB ON (BUDE TEN | 
The gay redhead woodpecker is a regular tenant, the flicker occasional, 
and last year one of the “‘apartments”’ was occupied by a family of 
screech owls. On a weekly wash-day one morning we found the owl 
children perched on a shrub near the big oak where we watched the sober 
fluffy babies for a long time. 
It was in the big oak that I first saw the crested flycatcher; I heard its 
unusual whistle and rushed out in time to see it going in and out of one 
of the hollow limbs. 
On another wash-day we discovered a mother squirrel moving its 
babies from the tower on the house into one of the unoccupied “‘oak 
rooms.” 
It carried the babies one at a time over the house roof down to the 
ground then up the tree trunk to the new home. The baby squirrels 
appeared to wrap themselves around the mother’s neck, so that when she 
jumped from branch to branch they seemed perfectly safe from the 
possibility of falling. 
During the spring migration brown creepers, both the kinglets, and 
many of the brilliantly hued warblers come to the Oak and the shrub- 
bery. 
Redstarts, baybreasted, chestnut sided, blackburnian, blackpoll, 
myrtle, black-throated blue, black-throated green and the Maryland 
yellow-throat, are common, with others of the great warbler flight visit- 
ing us less frequently. 
Cardinals stay with us all winter, and twice have built in the wild 
grape vine outside our pantry window. Once I saw the olive green 
female scarlet tanager in the autumn migration. 
One summer a swarm of bees occupied the old oak from whose store: 
house we gathered a considerable quantity of delicious honey. 
The venerable white oak seems as much a part of the old home asso- 
ciation as does the big frame house, with its more than half a century of 
the intimate life of three generations of Plumbs. . 
One cannot fail to have a strong affection for this stately home of 
the wild things that come and go, and act as if the old oak really be- 
longed to them as much as it does to the generations of Plumbs. 
Houses change in fashion, but our old home and the old oak survive 
the changes, never losing their dignity and keeping the same hospitable 
welcome for the folks and the wild things, that has been their tradition 
for more than half a century. 
Anna D. PLums, 
Streator, Illinois. 
March, 1928. 
