BIRDS OF NANTUCKET
JEEPERS, IT'SACREEPER!
by Kenneth Turner Blackshaw
Ifound my first Brown Creeper over 50 years ago, dead on the Main Street sidewalk in front of Murray's Toggery Shop. Unfortunately I couldn't add it to my 'Life' list at that point since only live, wild, and free birds are candidates for one's life list. As an aside, most birders maintain a life list as a way of keeping score of their birding experiences. Mine is now over a thousand species. With time, travels, and changing of species, you can easily lose track. More on that later.

Brown Creeper

Even though this was not yet a life bird I had no trouble recognizing it since it was pictured on the page with the nuthatches in my Peterson field guide. I studied its white belly as it lay there in my hand, barely large enough to reach across, and mostly tail at that. The beak fascinated me, long, thin, and black, slightly curved with a sharp point.

I should have carried it directly to the Maria Mitchell Association, or at least over to my mentor, Edith Andrews, so it could have become part of the bird collection, but alas, I must have reverently buried it in the garden. Interestingly there are now six Brown Creepers in the Edith Andrews collection at Maria Mitchell, the earliest from 1979, found dead on Vestal St. on November 11. That bird had lost its tail!

Brown Creepers are wonderful, very fascinating birds, and well named. Yes, they are brown, and yes, they creep. They spend most of their time hitching their way in a spiral, up a tree trunk. From the back, their brown and white streaking causes them to blend into the pattern of the bark. It they stop moving, they become invisible and this is their main defense if a predator tries to catch them.

Their Latin genus name is Certhia, a name that originates from Aristotle himself, the Greek word for a tree creeper. The Greeks called it 'kerthios,' which does make me wonder if we should pronounce the word with a hard, rather than a soft, 'c.' Until the 1980s this bird's species name was familiaris, reminding me that all our domestic dogs, be they Great Danes or Pekinese, all carry the name Canis familiaris. A little more research shows they are actually Canis lupus familiaris. Yes, all our dogs are genetically the same as the wolf.

The creeper's name change brings me back to the problems birders have with life lists. Until the name change, if you saw a creeper in Europe, it did not count as an additional species for your life list. Theirs and ours were the same. Now our American creepers are called Certhia americana, so if you have seen the European one, you could have two species!

Unfortunately this kind of thing goes on all the time. If I may 'snipe' a bit about 'snipe,' in my birding career the snipe we have on Nantucket have been Wilson's Snipe, then Common Snipe, and now back to Wilson's again. I saw the real Common Snipe while in the Aleutians last year, so I have two snipe on my life list - until they lump them together again anyway.

Back to our Brown Creepers, when new birders see one it seems like they've truly arrived in the birding world. This bird is subtle, both in appearance and sound, yet very appealing. Dr. Winsor Marrett Tyler described a bit of this in his 1914 monograph, "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."

Dr. Tyler says it well, with the addition that the 'dry leaf' attaches itself to the base of another tree at the last moment, from whence it journeys upward again.

On Nantucket we consider this nifty bird to be rare most of the year, but common in April and May and October. It is missing in the summer months and Nantucket County is one of the few places in Massachusetts where nesting is not confirmed. Nests are hard to find since they are placed on the trunk of a tree between peeling bark and the core of the tree itself.

If you are walking in the pines, listen for a high, very soft, drawn out, 'seee.' Use your ears to locate the sound and then watch for that bit of bark floating down to start up its next tree. This is a wonderful bit of nature that you

can make part of your life. I

George C. West creates illustrations for these articles. If you enjoy 'social' birding, join the Nantucket Bird Club at 8 a.m. Sundays in front of Nantucket High School for a two to three hour birding trip. Call 228- 1693 for more information.

To hear about rare birds, or to leave a bird report call the Massachusetts Audubon hot line at 1-781-259-8805. Ask Ken a question at: kenandcindy1@comcast.net.