Bird lore - Project Puffin

232 Bird- Lore
several tree trunks in rapid succession where they had recently gleaned, and
then fly off to new pastures.
!
In going to the nest now, they generally entered without warning; perhaps
because, as the young grew older, their nerves reacted more quickly to parental
stimulus and it was no longer necessary to rouse them. When a parent actually
fed from outside, one day, it seemed to mark an epoch. The nestlings were
certainly growing up. Owing to uneasy movements in the nest, perhaps,
nesting material was now sticking out of the crack in the bark. As the days
passed and the sun got farther around it fell on the nest slit, and ht up the
head of the parent as it came with food.
One of the old birds, whom I took to be the father, once worked slowly up
the tree next the nest, talking to himself or his little ones, as he went; and as
the young grew older, a slight song was often heard, a song composed of the
same high-pitched notes as the call, beginning in fact with the call note, I-i,
and being little more than a fine rather plaintive I-i, high-y, I-y.
When sitting between the trees watching the nest, one day, I laid my
kaki hat on the moss and leaves beside me and, after a while, glancing down,
was attracted by a slight movement and, on watching closely, discovered a
little long-pointed brown nose, followed by the slender brown body of a tiny
shrew. It nosed under my hat brim and then explored still farther till, with a
dart and a dash, it ran swiftly away. Beyond the cleared circle sometimes the
swaying of a branch was followed by the titter of a chipmunk or a pine squirrel,
while overhead came the call of the Red-shafted Flicker, the sweet swee'-ah-
swee-see of a Chestnut-backed Chickadee, or the kimp, kimp, of Crossbills
passing over; and up on a stump top close by sometimes came a cocky little
brown Winter Wren, swaying from side to side, giving his tinkling song with
abandon. The day the shrew appeared, when I had moved back to sit on the
edge of the piazza, a noise on the shake roof overhead made me look up just
in time to see a disappearing mouse-like tail. Then came the tchip of a Junco
and the sound of little feet alighting on the roof. Inside the deserted cabin the
handsome large-eyed wood rats were thought to have found shelter, and in
the peak of the attic, interesting long-eared bats were discovered hanging.
Surely the mossy cabin was stiU befriending its little neighbors—fulfilling
kindly offices as it had when itself a part of the forest.
Just as the Creeper family were getting more and more interesting, there
was an enforced break in my visits. When at last I was able to return to my
small friends, two weeks after my discovery of the nest, while still in the sunny
prairie outside, I heard Creeper voices, and no sooner had I stepped inside
the cool woods than I realized what had happened. There was no need to
go back to the nest
The air was full of tiny voices and the tree trunks, on close scrutiny, revealed
little creeping forms. Instead of the solitary figure of an ascending parent,
there were now often two, evidently parent and child. Attracted by a slight