(_Certbia familiaris americana_) Creeper family
_Length_--5 to 5.75 inches. A little smaller than the English
sparrow.
_Male and Female_--Brown above, varied with ashy-gray stripes
and small, lozenge-shaped gray mottles. Color lightest on
head, increasing in shade to reddish brown near tail. Tail
paler brown and long; wings brown and barred with whitish.
Beneath grayish white. Slender, curving bill.
_Range_--United States and Canada, east of Rocky Mountains.
_Migrations_--April. September. Winter resident.
This little brown wood sprite, the very embodiment of virtuous
diligence, is never found far from the nuthatches, titmice, and
kinglets, though not strictly in their company, for he is a rather
solitary bird. Possibly he repels them by being too exasperatingly
conscientious.
Beginning at the bottom of a rough-barked tree (for a smooth bark
conceals no larvA|), the 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.
Yet this little bird is not altogether the soulless drudge he appears.
In the midst of his work, uncheered 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.