Brown creepers

Today was a red-letter day for one of my favorite birds - the brown creeper. I saw four in Prospect and Central Park. This small tree climber does not breed in New York City but has been recorded as nesting in every other county in the state except Niagara, according to Bull's Birds of New York State. As recently as the 1960s, it was a rare breeder outside of the Catskills and Adirondacks although a nest was found in 1926 in the Bronx. Bull's theorizes that its expansion is due to "reforestation and the maturation of the eastern forests . . .."

Audubon has this to say about the brown creeper's nesting habits:

This bird breeds in the hole of a tree, giving a marked preference to such as are small and rounded at the entrance. For this reason, perhaps, it often takes possession of the old and abandoned nests of our smaller Woodpeckers and Squirrels; but it is careless as to the height of the situation above the ground, for I have found its nest in a hole in a broken stump which I could reach with my hand, although I could not examine it on account of the hardness of the wood. All the nests which I have seen were loosely formed of grasses and lichens of various sorts, and warmly lined with feathers . . .

Creepers nest not only in holes but in "hammocks" created by loose bark. The brown creeper is an elegant bird. It has a long tail which assists it in methodically "creeping" up the trunks of trees and its curved bill helps it glean insects from crevices in the bark of trees.

I've always been a big fan of woodpeckers and I think that's the reason I'm attracted to the brown creeper. As Sibley notes, this bird is more like a woodpecker than any other passerine, both in the way it forages for food and in the way it molts its feathers. Like woodpeckers, the brown creeper retains its central tail feathers while molting as it needs these for support while climbing (over and over again) the trunks of the trees in our parks and forests.