It's a big tree, perhaps 200 years old. It stands there somewhat alone in an idle pasture. Looking at it satisfies the eyes, like a cool drink satisfies the throat. Last spring orioles built a nest far out on a high limb. My family and I could watch the pair and the neat bag-like nest until the awkward nestlings fledged.
Deer often pause or bed down within the oak's island of habitat.
And at one time there was a fat rope hung double from a near parallel branch with a board seat worn smooth at the notches from hours of service as a child's swing. Naturalists Carver, Leopold, and Muir all wrote of the bur oak. It symbolizes the eco-tone between forest and prairie. Apparently, the bur oak was able to survive prairie conditions including the wild fires that tended to keep the prairie prairie. Each April before the new grasses had covered the prairie with unburnable greenery, fires ran at will over the land.