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III THE BROWN CREEPER
IN the midst of a
Massachusetts winter, when a man with his eyes open may walk five miles over
favorable country roads and see only ten or twelve kinds of birds, the brown
creeper’s faint zeep is a truly welcome sound. He is a very little fellow, very
modestly dressed, without a bright feather on him, his lower parts being white
and his upper parts a mottling of brown and white, such as a tailor might call
a “pepper and salt mixture.” The creeper’s life
seems as quiet as his colors. You will find him by overhearing his note some
where on one side of you as you pass. Now watch him. He is traveling rather
quickly, with an alert, business-like air, up the trunk of a tree in a spiral
course, hitching along inch by inch, bugging the bark, and every little while
stop ping to probe a crevice of it with his long, curved, sharply pointed bill.
He is in search of food, — insects’ eggs, grubs, and what not; morsels so tiny
that it need not surprise us to see him spending the whole day in satisfying
his hunger. There is one thing
to be said for such a life: the bird is never without something to take up his
mind. In fact, if he enjoys the pleasures of the table half as well as some
human beings seem to do, his life ought to be one of the happiest imaginable. How flat and thin
he looks, and how perfectly his colors blend with the grays and browns of the
mossy bark! No wonder it is easy for us to pass near him without knowing it. We
under stand now what learned people mean when they talk about the “protective coloration”
of animals. A hawk flying overhead, on the lookout for game, must have hard
work to see this bit of a bird clinging so closely to the bark as to be almost
a part of it. And if a hawk does
pass, you may be pretty sure the creeper will see him, and will flatten himself
still more tightly against the tree and stay as motionless as the bark itself.
He needs neither to fight nor to run away. His strength, as the prophet said,
is to sit still. But look! As the
creeper comes to the upper part of the tree, where the bark is less furrowed
than it is below, and therefore less likely to conceal the scraps of provender
that he is in search of, he suddenly lets go his hold and flies down to the
foot of another tree, and begins again to creep upward. If you keep track of
him, you will see him do this hour after hour. He never walks down. Up, up, he
goes, and if you look sharply enough, you will see that whenever he pauses he
makes use of his sharp, stiff tail-feathers as a rest — a kind of camp-stool,
as it were, or, better still, a bracket. He is built for his work; color, bill,
feet, tail-feathers — all were made on purpose for him. He is a native of
the northern country, and therefore to most readers of this book he is a winter
bird only. If you know his voice, you will hear him twenty times for once that
you see him. If you know neither him nor his voice, it will be worth your while
to make his acquaintance. When you come upon
a little bunch of chickadees flitting through the woods, listen for a quick, lisping
note that is something like theirs, but different. It may be the creeper’s, for
al though he seems an unsocial fellow, seldom flock ing with birds of his own
kind, he is fond of the chickadee’s cheerful companionship. To see him and hear
his zeep, you would never take him for a songster; but there is no telling by
the looks of a bird how well he can sing. In fact, plainly dressed birds are,
as a rule, the best musicians. The very handsome ones have no need to charm
with the voice. And our modest little creeper has a song, and a fairly good
one; one that answers his purpose, at all events, al though it may never make
him famous. In springtime it may be heard now and then even in a place like
Boston Common; but of course you must go where the birds pair and nest if you
would hear them at their finest; for birds, like other people, sing best when
they feel happiest. The brown creeper’s
nest used to be something of a mystery. It was sought for in woodpeckers’
holes. Now it is known that as a general thing it is built behind a scale of
loose bark on a dead tree, between the bark and the trunk. Ordinarily, if not
always, it will be found under a flake that is loose at the bottom instead of
at the top. Into such a place the female bird packs tightly a mass of twigs and
strips of the soft inner bark of trees, and on the top of this prepares her
nest and lays her eggs. Her mate flits to and fro, keeping her company, and
once in a while cheering her with a song, but so far as has yet been discovered
he takes no hand in the work itself. It is quite possible that the female, who
is to occupy the nest, prefers to have her own way in the construction of it. After the young
ones are hatched, at all events, the father bird’s behavior leaves nothing to
be complained of. He “comes to time,” as we say, in the most loyal manner. In
and out of the nest he and the mother go, feeding their hungry charges, making
their entry and exit always at the same point, through the merest crack of a
door, between the overhanging bark and the tree, just above the nest. It is a
very pretty bit of family life. It would be hard to
imagine a nest better concealed from a bird’s natural enemies, especially when,
as is often the case, the tree stands in water on the edge of a stream or lake.
And not only is the nest wonderfully well hidden, but it is perfectly sheltered
from rain, as it would not be if it were built under a strip of bark that was
peeled from above. All in all, we must respect the simple, demure-looking
creeper as a very clever architect. |
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