Brown Creepers, in General and in Particular

Brown Creepers are one of my favorite birds. One in particular stole my heart.

Brown Creepers in General

(Listen to the radio version of Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.)

Early spring is the time to start paying attention for early migrants. One early arrival in forests, parks, and old neighborhoods with large trees is the Brown Creeper, the only member of the family Certhiidae in the Americas. This attractive, small and slender bird is cryptically colored to match tree bark. It has a delicate, relatively long bill, curved downward to pick out tiny insects from crevices in the tree bark, and long, stiff, tail feathers that curve downward at the other end to brace it against tree trunks. Its hind toe bears a long, strong claw providing an additional brace to help the bird hitch its way up tree trunks.

The Brown Creeper’s lovely, high-pitched sounds are beyond my hearing now unless the creeper is very close and I crank up my hearing aids to eleven. Losing the Brown Creeper calls and songs is one of the bitter tragedies of old age, but it’s well offset by the joy of still being alive and able to see these wonderful birds.

I saw my first Brown Creeper on December 16, 1975, at the Morton Arboretum outside Chicago. A month later, on January 30, 1976, I added it to my Michigan list at Baker Woodlot on the Michigan State University campus, and by February, according to my field notes, I was recognizing the tiny mites by sound. It isn’t uncommon for them to overwinter in Lansing, Michigan, or Madison, Wisconsin. Rarely, one may even overwinter in Duluth or the Sax-Zim Bog.

I photographed this little creeper in the Sax-Zim Bog in the dead of winter, on February 2, 2013. It was feeding from trees, but also picking up tiny morsels of suet that dropped below feeders.

I usually find my first up here in late March or early April. On some days in mid-April as their migration peaks, I may see half a dozen or more in my own backyard.

Brown Creepers live up to their name, creeping up tree trunks, often in an upward spiral, until they encounter too many branches, when they flutter down to a low spot on another trunk and creep up that one. If they continue up a limb, they gravitate to the underside.

Arthur Cleveland Bent put together a wonderful series of books about the life histories of North American birds, and gave Winsor Merritt Tyler the honor of writing the Brown Creeper entry. He opened it with this superb description:

The brown creeper, as he hitches along the bole of a tree, looks like a fragment of detached bark that is defying the law of gravitation by moving upward over the trunk, and as he flies off to another tree he resembles a little dry leaf blown about by the wind. As he climbs up the tree, he is feeding, picking up tiny bits of food that he finds half-hidden in the crevices of bark along his path. In his search, he does not work like the woodpeckers, those skilled mechanics whose work requires the use of carpenter’s tools, the drill and chisel. The creeper’s success depends on painstaking scrutiny, thoroughness, and almost, it seems, consciousness. Edmund Selous (1901), speaking of the European tree-creeper, a bird close to ours in habit, uses the exact word to show us the creeper at work. “His head,” he says, “which is as the sentient handle to a very delicate instrument, is moved with such science, such dentistry, that one feels and appreciates each turn of it.

Creepers seem as earnest and focused as they are sentient, and as introverted as songbirds could be. Occasionally during migration, I spot two or more in my backyard or the same swath of woodland, and they often associate with chickadee flocks, but they hang out on the periphery, never in the thick of things, and when the flock moves on, a creeper may linger a while. It’s only where they’re nesting that we’re likely to see two near each other; even then, except when doing their charming courtship flights or at the nest itself, they stay focused on their own work, like a couple who are deeply in love but have different work places.

Even the most introverted among us fall in love, creepers included. I’ve only seen a courtship flight a handful of times in my life. Winsor Marrett Tyler describes it beautifully and accurately:

Once in a while we see a bird launch out from a tree and at top speed twine around it close to the bark, then dart away and twist around another tree, or weave in and out among the surrounding trees and branches. He has thrown off his staid creeper habits and has become for the time a care-free aerial sprite, giving himself up, it seems, to an orgy of speed, wild dashes, and twists and turns in the air. But after a round or two, back on the bark again, he resumes his conventional routine and becomes once more a brown creeper.

Bird observers in the early 1800s claimed the Brown Creeper nests in cavities, but in 1879, Thomas Brewer wrote that the normal nest, as with the European creeper, is built between a tree trunk and a flap of partially detached bark. Sure enough, the next spring, William Brewster used that tip to search trees near Lake Umbagog in Maine and discovered quite a number of nests.

On May 1, 1976, Russ and I went on a Michigan Audubon trip that included a nice long stop at Hartwick Pines State Park, where my mentor Joan Brigham found a Brown Creeper nest at eye level. It was the loveliest thing, exquisitely concealed on the truck of a huge white pine, the hammock-shaped nest woven of bits of bark, fuzzy material such as spider silk and Usnea lichen wedged where a large piece of bark was jutting out. I recall one or two tiny eggs, white speckled with rust. I’ve never since seen a Brown Creeper nest at eye level, so I’ve never seen a nestling, and creepers are so quiet and cautious that I’ve never seen a fledgling, either. Winsor Merritt Tyler wrote of one brood:

The young birds left the Concord nest early on June 4 (possibly June 3). At 8 am, two were clinging, 30 feet from the ground, to the trunk of a living white pine tree which stood not far from the nest. One or two more were on another pine trunk. The little birds were extremely difficult to find by reason of their small size, their distance from the ground, their inconspicuous color and especially because each took a station in the dark shadow immediately below a horizontal limb. Here they remained motionless for many minutes. Later, two young birds, one following the other, moved upward by feeble hitches and perched or squatted close to the trunk in the right angle formed by the limb. In hitching over the bark, they moved almost straight upward and whenever I saw them as a silhouette against the sky, and could thus determine the point, they did not use their tail for support. The shortness of the young Creeper’s tails gave to their bodies a rounded, unbird-like outline and, with their short, stubby bills of wide gape and their squatting position on the upright bark they suggested tree-toads in no small degree. Like most young birds after they leave the nest, the fledgling Creepers were more noisy than they’d been the day before. They announced their whereabouts to their parents with a note not previously heard—a high sibilant call, “tssssi” or sometimes clearly divided into two syllables thus: “ts-tssi” The voice was very slightly tremulous and, although the pitch and delivery of the notes were decidedly Creeper-like, they suggested to Mr. Faxon and me a flock of Cedarbirds.

It’s during spring and fall that most of us get to enjoy creepers in our backyards, but they’re usually so quiet that we must pay attention to notice them in the first place. I usually see them at Park Point or in lovely old forests, but there’s something special about the ones passing through my own backyard.

One Particular Brown Creeper

This is the very one!

It takes much more than a bird’s subdued loveliness and shy ways to make me fall in love, but I fell truly madly deeply in love with one particular Brown Creeper in 1978, when I was a teacher at St. James School in Madison, Wisconsin. One spring morning when I arrived at school, our janitor brought me the little bird, who had apparently collided with a window. It had a sprained wing, so it remained in my classroom for several days.

I’ll never forget holding that tiny mite for the first time—its forward-facing eyes, an adaptation to give it binocular close-range vision as it looks into the tiny crevices in tree bark, looked directly into my own eyes. Many stunned birds seem unusually tame, but this one was alert—simply very calm. During the following days, as it grew stronger and started flying, it never once acted fearful. That word Winsor Merritt Tyler used to describe them, sentient, seemed true and apt.

We kept the window shades in my classroom pulled so it wouldn’t crash again. I got permission from the office to send two students to buy some mealworms at a nearby pet shop, and we set up several fairly large tree limbs here and there in the classroom where the little bird could perch and hitch its way up. But in this peculiar habitat, it didn’t limit itself to those woody substrates—many times it alighted on a student’s or my ankle and hitched its way up a knee sock, trouser, or pantyhose-covered leg.

After several days, when it was easily flying from one limb, human or arboreal, to another without getting grounded, it was time to release it, so we took a class hike to a nearby wooded park with the creeper in a shoebox.

When we reached a good spot in the midst of lots of large trees, I opened the box, half expecting that the moment it saw the woods, it would take off. But no—it let me pick it up out of the box and hold it momentarily as it looked all around, studying its surroundings with interest. I handed it to one of my students who held her arm out and opened her fingers. The little bird kept studying the trees and each of us gathered around even as the little girl held her hand wide open. After at least 30 seconds, and possibly as long as a minute, it flew to the base of the nearest tree, just four or five feet away. We watched it hitch its way up, taking its time, opening its bill a few times to snap up microscopic insects. Then it moved to another, equally close tree and did the same. We watched it climb that tree, and another, and another, in no hurry to get away from us.

This is the only snapshot of mine that turned out when we released the little bird.

We weren’t in any hurry to get away from it, either. But little by little it worked its way deeper into the woods, and finally we lost sight of it. I whispered, “Live long and prosper,” and we trudged back to school.

Not one of us cried, at least not obviously. How could we not feel sad to say farewell to our pleasant little friend even as we were genuinely thrilled that we had saved its life and returned it to its natural home? For homework, I told the kids to write down the definition of the word ambivalent. I bet they still remember what it means.