It was a beautiful afternoon and I took a camp chair into the backyard. I positioned it where I could get shots of birds staging in our tulip tree before they dropped down onto my feeding station, AKA Tim's Diner.
Look closely and you'll see the first bird I saw. It's a Brown Creeper (Certhia americana) that stopped its upward spiral around the tree trunk just long enough for me to get this shot.
Creepers are small - 5 inches / 13cm from bill to tail - and are marvelously camouflaged. They are really hard to see and it's really only their movement that betray their location, but they move so fast and in a spiral around the tree that you see them only for a second. In 1948, naturalist WM Tyler said, “The Brown Creeper, as he hitches along the bole of a tree, looks like a fragment of detached bark that is defying the law of gravitation by moving upward over the trunk, and as he flies off to another tree he resembles a little dry leaf blown about by the wind.”
