The industrious Brown Creeper, seldom seen, always welcome.
Last month during the Great Backyard Bird Count run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, I was gratified to have a Brown Creeper appear on the sugar maple outside my kitchen window on count day.
It was nice of her to show up. She (or he, the sexes look alike) is an infrequent visitor to our yard, appearing every two months or so, in all seasons. I am assuming it is the same bird since she is seen on only two trees, the sugar maple and a soft maple, flies to the same spot on the trunk, and works her way up its length. She eschews the basswood and the red maple, which are nearby and have the same rugged, coarse bark that creepers prefer as they pry under, gleaning for insect grubs. Some brown creepers are known to migrate– T. S. Roberts notes in The Birds of Minnesota that a bird banded in Illinois in 1926 was seen in Ely, Minnesota in 1928. But others hang around all winter, especially in northern Minnesota, which is where they nest.
Roberts also considered creepers as only “half-hardy.” He relates a report from one of his observers on Big Island in Lake Minnetonka of a flock of nine seen on January 4,1912. Later in the month, four birds were found dead, three clinging to tree bark, and one on the snow. Their stomachs contained food, so the observer concluded they had frozen. The observer also added that his brother had encountered a weakened brown creeper that same month, scooped it up and held it in the house overnight, after which it perked up and was released.
Brown Creepers are small, about the size of a Black-capped Chickadee, and sprite-like, wedging their nests between a tree and its loosened bark, using small sticks, bits of moss and spider web. They tend to prefer conifers. They are often overlooked, with their tucked-away family life and weak, high-pitched song. When you do see them, they are usually clinging to the trunk of a tree, moving spirally upward. The Crossly Guide calls it “a brown-and-white mouse with a long, spiky tail.”
Unlike most of our North American birds, the Brown Creeper has no close cousins on this continent. There are two “tree creepers” in Europe that look nearly identical to the Brown Creeper, and two more distantly-related kin, one in India and one in Africa. DNA studies lump them with nuthatches, wrens and gnatcatchers in a superfamily, Certhoidea.
Recent Comments