Our favourite little bird species started appearing near our feeder at the end of October. Often described as looking like “a fragment of detached bark” that took off up the tree trunk or a “dry leaf blown about by the wind” (naturalist W.M. Tyler, 1948), the brown creeper is so well camouflaged it is very hard to see until it moves. Creepers are usually seen single, but we got lucky and had two together near our feeder.
This small bird with a lovely streaked brownish back, pale creamy belly and downwardly pointed, curved beak climbs up tree trunks gleaning insects from the bark. It typically flies to a tree and lands near the base, climbs upward (often spirally) as high as it feels inclined, then swoops back down to the base of the same, or an adjacent tree, and repeats its upward search again.
Because it uses its tail as a prop and stabilizer as it moves upwards, it cannot creep faced downward, unlike the red-breasted nuthatch which can do both. I wonder if they meet and greet as they pass each other.
The brown creeper is a hard-to-see species typically found in shady mature and old forests, usually coniferous. It often builds its hammock-shaped nest in behind peeling flakes of bark, although they have been known to nest behind window shutters, under or in roofs, in fence posts and even concrete blocks. The nest often has two openings, the entrance facing downward and the exit facing upward. (Why?)
Creepers are very quiet little birds with very high-pitched call notes and a prettier chatty song near the nest. Once the call is learned it is easy to remember but only if you can hear it.
Creepers are found throughout B.C., but sparsely in the north and are more common in the Lower Mainland and southern Vancouver Island. They are also in southern Yukon and Alaska and across Canada roughly south of 55N, then down throughout the U.S. and patchy in Central America.
Typically, creepers eat mainly insects, but may take suet and seeds, but not usually directly from the feeder. We have seen them forage on the ground at the base of a spruce tree where the suet and seed feeder sometimes hang. The creepers are picking up bits of suet and maybe broken sunflower seeds dropped by other visiting birds.
However, creepers feeding at the base of trees are very susceptible to ambush by cats who hide on the other side of the trunk and pounce, so we keep our cats inside.
