Though the welcomed Reddy Woodpecker when he came to live in Pleasant Valley there was hardly another bird family that wasn't sorry to see him settle there. Among all the feathered folk on Farmer Green's place the family was perhaps the sorriest. They had a nest of eggs in the , in a crotch of an old apple tree. And it was on just such trees that Reddy Woodpecker spent a great deal of his time, hunting for grubs.  
Jolly Robin himself might not have paid much to Reddy. But Mrs. Robin was a great worrier. Often she worried over nothing at all. And now that she had had a few talks with timid little Mrs. Chippy about the newcomer, Reddy Woodpecker, Mrs. Robin firmly believed that he had come to the farm expressly to rob her of her four greenish-blue eggs. After each talk with Mrs. Chippy Mrs. Robin came home all a-flutter.
 
"We'll have to watch sharp!" she said to Jolly Robin again and again. "This Woodpecker person is a . It's a pity we built here in the orchard. We'd have been safer on top of one of the posts under Farmer Green's porch."
 
"I mentioned that very place," Jolly reminded her. "But you were afraid of Miss Kitty Cat."
 
Not a day passed without some such words between them. Jolly did what he could to calm his wife's fears. He stayed near home all the time, when often he would have liked to fly across the meadow to chat with friends who lived on the edge of the woods.
 
Reddy Woodpecker never started to rap on a tree but Mrs. Robin set up a loud twitter, begging Jolly to hurry back to the nest.
 
He was wonderfully patient with her. Yet he couldn't help hoping, secretly, for the day when his family should be grown up and able to look out for themselves.
 
But if Mrs. Robin was anxious about her eggs her worry was nothing compared with what it became when ............