The Brown Creeper: Songs from the Wood

Welcome to March! If you walk in the forest this week, you might detect the song of a non-descript little brown bird called the "brown creeper." 

Brown creepers are hard to see. Their habit is to creep upward on tree trunks, often in spiral fashion remaining well-hidden. It sports mottled "tree-bark pattern" camouflage.

The creeper has a de-curved bill - like an inverted spoon - which it uses to pry craggy bark as it probes for tasty insects, their eggs and larvae. Brown creepers even sling hammock-shaped nests behind large flakes of bark found on dead and dying trees - peeling plates of white pine, white ash or red maple bark.

I hear that sibilant, warbler-like song by late winter. It's become my favorite harbinger of winter's end. I associate creeper song with strong sunlight streaming through snowy woods on a frosty morning which promises to warm above freezing. Creepers always begin singing in early maple sugaring season when sap flows and tree buds redden and swell in oddly warm sunshine.

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Credit Greg Clark, via mirror-pole.com

The tree-bark pattern of the Brown Creeper helps the bird to stay well hidden.

Bird songs kindle memories. Hearing a favorite bird's song for first time in many months acclimates me to the seasons of the forest. I feel like an impressionable nestling imprinted on each successive, species-specific song. We may make joyous - or sad - associations with bird songs that will ring through the warming woods! They're heart songs; songs from the wood.

Read more about the Brown Creeper.