33: Brown Creeper

I write to you from Arapahoe, Ute, and Cheyenne land. I am interested in learning about the different animals that live in the place where I was born. I want to mention that biological classification as taught by western science has its roots in racism, sexism, and transphobia – here’s a good explainer about why.

The Brown Creeper (Certhia americana, also American Treecreeper) is a small songbird, mottled brown on the upper part of its body and downy white on the underside. They live mainly in forests full of large, old trees, especially preferring conifers, where they like to forage for the tasty insects that make up most of their diet. They also have a long, thin beak that tilts downward at its tip and a stiff tail that aids it in “creeping” – supporting itself vertically as it moves up and down a tree, using their special beak to probe and investigate along the bark for invertebrate treats.

You can hear their sounds here. Lots of websites said it was a distinctive call but I am struggling to make the distinction…

They build cup- or hammock-shaped nests which have two openings: one facing downward that serves as the entrance and one facing upward that serves as the exit. They build their nests behind loose pieces of bark or otherwise disguise them within trees.

The Cornell Lab relays this amazing fact about them:

“Brown Creepers burn an estimated 4–10 calories (technically, kilocalories) per day, a tiny fraction of a human’s daily intake of about 2,000 kilocalories. By eating a single spider, a creeper gains enough energy to climb nearly 200 feet vertically.”

Good luck seeing these tiny fellas, they are well camouflaged and apparently so hard to detect clearly that there is confusion as to how many species there are in Europe. Luckily for Colorado, they are the only treecreeper in North America, so if you do see one, you can be sure of what kind it is!