I ran into a colleague who's a great birder and birding photographer, and in the course of our conversation about what we'd seen lately, he told me about the riches he'd encountered in what we jokingly call a "rabbitat": an area, deliberately more-or-less clearcut to create suitable digs for a near-endangered native bunny known as the New England Cottontail. The strategy seems to be working, and the hard-to-spot rabbit has made a comeback. But the critter is not the only beneficiary of the strategic removal of sections of mature forest that allow younger woods to thrive. Many birds flourish in such areas, and as I walked through a stretch of nearby state forest, I heard, for the first time in years, the ascending trills of Prairie Warblers. The birds, once common, have been gone from our neighborhood for ages, but in the proper habitat I trekked, here they were. Alas, here they were, heard but never seen. However, in a dead hardwood left behind by the loggers, a pair of Tree Swallows preened and used the tree as a perch to rest, work on their feathers, and scan the sky for collections of bugs.