Crypsis

Recently, I wrote a post about hiding in plain sight, but today I saw a much better example of this type of camouflage when a little Brown Creeper visited the Buckeye tree outside my sun porch window.

The Brown Creeper’s white breast feathers resemble the snow that still clings to some of the branches of the tree, and its mottled back feathers blend in perfectly with the bark.

Only slightly more obvious lower down on the tree, the bird spiraled its way up from the base of the tree, while poking into crevices along the way.  I can’t imagine what it could find on a day like this when the temperature was  -12 F (-24 C)

This tiny little bird weighs only half as much as a Chickadee. It’s hard to imagine how they survive the bitter cold winters of the northern Great Plains.  I assume they do find some little critters in the cracks and crevices of the trees they explore. Eating just one tiny spider will sustain them for another few hours of foraging.

One naturalist wrote about them:  “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.”  Which is exactly what I saw today.

A little creeper

A rarely seen bird (for me) was hunting insects or spiders on a live oak, and I stopped to watch while it foraged.

Brown Creepers (Certhia americana) are cryptically colored small bits of fluff that spiral up and around the trunk ad branches of a tree, continuously moving, in and out of shade and sun, stopping only for a fraction of a second to explore tiny crevices for their hidden prey.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology website has a great quote that summarizes the peculiarities of this tiny bird wonderfully:

“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.”

Part Woodpecker, part Nuthatch in behavior, they have their own unique style and anatomy.

Their stiff tail feathers prop them up on the tree bark, and their very elongated big toe (hallux) opposes the other three toes to help stabilize them vertically.  The slightly decurved bill is useful for probing into miniscule cracks in the bark of the trees.

Brown Creepers are actually fairly common and year-round residents over much of the U.S. (except the Great Plains) and western Canada, but are rarely seen because they are so cryptic and so quiet.  Spotting what looks like a piece of bark moving in a jerky spurts upward around a tree trunk might lead to sighting one of these cute little brown jobs.

Blending into the bark on which it forages is a good survival strategy.

Note:  I’m back in the deep freeze of Minnesota now, where the temperature was -21 F (-30 C, not counting whatever windchill factor decreased the temperature even more) the night I arrived, an 85 degree difference from the sunny California weather a few hours before.   The Minneapolis paper headline read:  “Brrrrrutal” the next day.