Brown creepers raid spider nests for food

“I have a bird in my backyard that has a long curved bill and starts at to bottom of the tree and probes in the rough bark while climbing up the tree, do you know what it is,” asked my friend Steve. I could not come up with a name immediately, but when I got home from our ride, I also found one on a hybrid poplar in my backyard. I immediately recognized it as a brown creeper – a rare bird in my backyard, but it was not alone.

As I watched it, two more of them showed up, busily flying from tree to tree, probing the rough bark, searching the crevasses created by the bark. They would start at the bottom of the tree and work their way up. Once they neared the top of the tree, they would fly to another or the same tree and repeat the process of finding insect matter.

With the temperature being below freezing, insects were not readily available and as I watched the creepers probe the crevasses, I noticed that they were collecting spider nests. The spider nests containing eggs, became a gooey mess as their curved bills worked them out of the pieces behind the bark on the trees. Their long, stiff tails allowed them to stabilize themselves as they moved up the trees, but unlike the red-breasted nuthatches, their claws on their feet did not allow them to move down the trees.

Their long forward-facing curved claws with their tail, allowed them to quickly move up the trees with small hops with both feet. I did observe several creepers being able to go around some limbs, occasionally hanging upside down to probe the space between the bark. I did not see them visit any of my seed or suet feeders, so I got a new feeder and put dried mealworms in it. I have not seen any creepers visit it yet, but the mountain chickadees love them. In their feeding trips, I have seen them collect hidden pieces of suet and eat them. Both mountain and black-capped chickadees along with nuthatches are always hiding food.

As I was watching my feeders on Friday, a sharp-shinned hawk came in to try to catch a lazy house finch or house sparrow and all the songbirds flew away except two creepers. They quickly rotated to the opposite side of the tree and flattened themselves against the trunk. Their cryptic coloration camouflaged them so well that I had to look closely to see where they were hidden.

Creepers are not very aggressive, they allow the nuthatches to be the bullies of the feeders, but I have not seen the nuthatches chase the creepers away from their hunting areas. They are also very quiet and only the males have a song that they perform during mating season in the spring.
They are also non-migraters, but they do move from the heavy evergreen area forests where they nest to mixed evergreen and deciduous pockets of trees during the winter. Due to their secret lifestyle, they are difficult to see during the summer, but when forced to move into towns, parks and cemeteries for find food during the winter, they become more visible.

Since I have a little arachnophobia, I am glad to see them harvesting as many spider nests as possible. They don’t only eat the spiders and their nests, but they use the spider webs to glue their small nests together when they build them in the spring. I am glad to see them in my backyard.
I hope all of you have a very Merry and a safe Christmas. If you see or have any odd birds showing up in your backyard, let me know. It is also time for the annual bird counts to start as we track their movements during the changing of the weather.

With the recent snow this week I went from a pair of northern flickers to 12 of them on Friday morning. It is going to be fun watching their battles for the next couple of months.