Country Ecology: Brown creeper

It has been a good year at my Tamworth bird feeding station. Chickadees and tufted titmice are active visitors and noisy. The cardinal pair are the headliners, but I was also rewarded in noting a brown creeper landing at the base of a nearby sugar maple. He didn't search long there, but flew to the base of another maturing tree of this species and started to hitch his way up that one. He spiraled to the far side all too quickly and I lost sight of him that way, but soon watched his progress going over to yet another pole-sized hardwood twenty feet beyond that one. Typical brown creeper behavior; they always start at the base of a tree and work from the bottom up as they inspect their bark crevices for insect life. They take one tree at a time, moving over to another one close by — in a very direct and attentive fashion, floating like a crisp, wind-blown leaf.