Brown Creeper

Common Backyard Birds

Brown Creeper (Certhia familiaris)

Length 5 inches. Breeds from Alaska and Canada south to the Great Lakes States and Connecticut; also in the mountains south to Nicaragua; winters over most of its range.

Rarely indeed is the creeper seen at rest. It appears to spend its life in an incessant scramble over the trunks and branches of trees, gleaning its insect food. It is so protectively colored as to be practically invisible to its enemies and, though delicately built, possesses strong feet and claws. Its tiny eyes are sharp enough to detect insects so small that most other species pass them by. The creeper fills a unique place in the ranks of our insect destroyers: minute insects, their eggs and larvae, moths, caterpillars, small wasps, scales, and plant lice are items of its diet.

It does not appear in flocks. Single birds or pairs will feed infrequently on beef suet at bird stations, but it is seldom a regular visitor.

BROWN CREEPER
(Certhia familiaris americana) Creeper family

This little brown wood sprite, the Brown Creeper. is the very embodiment of virtuous diligence. Never found far from the nuthatches, titmice, and kinglets, though not strictly in their company, for he is a rather solitary bird. Possibly the creeper repels them by being too exasperatingly conscientious.

Beginning at the bottom of a rough-barked tree (for a smooth bark conceals no larvae, the Brown Creeper silently climbs upward in a sort of spiral, now lost to sight on the opposite side of the tree, then reappearing just where he is expected to, flitting back a foot or two, perhaps, lest he overlooked a single spider egg, but never by any chance leaving a tree until conscience approves of his thoroughness.

And yet with all this painstaking workman's care, it takes him just about fifty seconds to finish a tree. Then off he flits to the base of another, to repeat the spiral process. Only rarely does he adopt the woodpecker process of partly flitting, partly rocking his way with the help of his tail straight up one side of the tree.

This little bird is not altogether the soulless drudge he appears. In the midst of his work, un-cheered by summer sunshine, and clinging with numb toes to the tree-trunk some bitter cold day, he still finds some tender emotion within him to voice in a "wild, sweet song" that is positively enchanting at such a time. But it is not often this song is heard south of his nesting grounds.

The Brown Creeper's plumage is one of Nature's most successful feats of mimicry -- an exact counterfeit in feathers of the brown-gray bark on which the bird lives. And the protective coloring is carried out in the nest carefully tucked under a piece of loosened bark in the very heart of the tree.

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