Mr. Squeakums
Sitta pusilla, brown-headed nuthatch

People don’t like snarls of old pine, the skeletons of dead trees. They get in the way of subdivisions, of farms, of chain restaurants. But to someone who is quick and clever, for whom a pine scale is a tool and the labyrinth of pinebark is a larder, what better home could there be? But they are so hard to find, now. You flit about, a rubber duck that is quick and alive, echoing from the pinetops with your kin, hoping that somewhere a great old pine will fall and give your children a home.

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