Tria teee Ae Ue UW BsO2N. = Be U lil bel tN 7 
eee. 
implements which were once used there — crude irons, dishes, candle 
molders and shotguns of that period. 
It was in an oak-hickory forest near Fort Parker that our entomologist, 
an Oklahoma girl, had a startling experience. She was standing near a red 
cedar examining an insect just collected when a movement on the ground 
attracted her attention. She looked down just in time to see a tawny two 
foot copperhead raise its head above her shoe top and begin to crawl 
leisurely over her left foot. It paid no attention whatsoever to the foot’s 
owner as she stood frozen to the spot but slid the full length of its bronze 
body over her shoe and out of sight among the leaves beyond. Only then 
did “Oklahoma” breathe a sigh of relief and relax her rigid muscles. She 
was the only member of the party who did not wear field boots regularly, 
and though we had all been looking for snakes, she was the only person to 
see one. It was a beautiful close-up view — perhaps too close! 
There were several kinds of deciduous holly in these central Texas 
forests, shrubs which are related to the holly we use for decorations at 
Christmas. Unlike our Christmas holly, however, these shrubs shed their 
leaves in the fall and are thus termed “deciduous.”’ There were scorpions, 
too, vicious looking creatures with a thick body, long tail, and two formida- 
ble pincers on the front end. The sting for which the scorpion is famous is 
at the end of the tail and ordinarily points downward, but when it is to be 
used, the tail bends over the back and the sting shoots forward. These were 
of a harmless variety, as are all but a very few American species living in 
the southwestern deserts. 
An early morning hike along a red clay country road gave me some 
inside pictures of Texas bird life. I came across scissor-tailed flycatchers 
belligerently chasing each other from tree to tree, and uttering loud shrieks 
at me whenever I approached their perches too closely. It was a pleasure to 
watch them fly and to see that long tail open and close as they maneuvered 
gracefully. Mockingbirds, brown thrashers, and catbirds were all singing, 
and so was the blue grosbeak, a stranger to me. Its song was a pleasing 
warble, similar in pattern but weaker in volume than its relative the rose- 
breasted grosbeak. The bird seemed timid, fiying quickly and quietly from 
view at any minor noise. Flashily-clad lark sparrows ran ahead of me in 
the road and in the shallow ditch on each side. From a telephone wire a 
small songster poured forth a song which reminded me faintly of the indigo 
bunting. But the song was too weak for the indigo bird and the color of 
this singer was not blue. He was olive green on the back, bright red on the 
breast and rump, and had a purple head. What a mixture of colors! But 
they blended well on him and gave him every right to be called the painted 
bunting. 
Ecologists spend a lifetime tramping about the country, scouring every 
hill and marsh and mountain for plants or animals that live in that spot 
and nowhere else. When they find them, they try to figure out why those 
plants and animals occur where they do, — and there are always several 
good reasons. One of the reasons for a tree’s choice of habitat shot at us 
with startling clarity in northern Louisiana, where we stopped on the banks 
of a small stream deep in virgin hardwood timber. This was a floodplain 
