Brown Creeper
Certhia americana

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Subphylum: Vertebrata
Class: Aves
Order: Passeriformes
Family: Certhiidae
Genus: Certhia

Audio for Species

Call
Song

from Macaulay Library

Species Related Links

Additional Brown Creeper Pictures

Description

Length: 4.7-5.5 in (12-14 cm) Weight: 0.2-0.4 oz (5-10 g) Wingspan: 6.7-7.9 in (17-20 cm)

The Brown Creeper is a very small, well camouflaged bird. It blends into the bark of a tree to become almost invisable with its brown and white striping on its back. The underside is white, but the bird is usually hugging itself close to the surface of the tree and is the only tree creeper in North America.

Subspecies: americana, montana, occidentalis, zelotes, albescens, alticola

Habitat, Range, and Feeding

The Brown Creeper inhabits almost all mature coniferous forests and mixed stands of conifers and decidous trees. It is very abundant in the Pacific Northwest, except the aniecnt forrests of the Olympics, where the trees are very large and further apart. The Creeper needs the trees to be closer together, but is very abundant in old growth mesophytic conifer forests. For nesting it prefers snags with a close proximity to old growth live trees for feeding.

The nest is usually behind loose bark on a tree trunk in snags, and made out of fine peices of bark, leaves, moss and feathers for the cup, with cocoons and spider egg cases tied to an outer surface of bark outside the cup. The clutch size is 1 to 8 eggs, that are white, normally with pink or reddish brown spots.

The Brown Creeper feeds on insects, spiders and other invertebrates it finds while gleening the bark of trees. Sometimes ingesting seeds.