BROWN CREEPER 63 



wing covert edgings whiter. Below, silky white, the crissum faintly 

 cinnamon ; tail olive-brown on the inner webs, Isabella color externally, 

 a faint barring discernible, the middle pair of rectrices more broadly 

 and less distinctly barred than in the juvenal plumage." 



Adults have a complete postnuptial molt in August. Fall birds 

 are usually darker, more suffused with buffy, especially on the flanks 

 and under tail coverts, and the white wing markings are tinged with 

 buffy white. Spring birds are somewhat faded above and dingy 

 white below.] 



Food. — Speaking of the food of the brown creeper, W. L. McAtee 

 (1926a) says: 



The bird must have a close and important relation with forest insects, but 

 unfortunately studies have not j'et been made that disclose the details of its 

 food habits. However, we know that it devours weevils, leaf beetles, flat-bugs, 

 jumping plant lice, leaf hoppers, scale insects, eggs of katydids, ants, and other 

 small hymenoptera, sawflies, moths, caterpillars, cocoons of the leaf skeleton- 

 izers (Bucculatrix), pupae of the codling moth, spiders, and pseudoscorpions. It 

 takes only a little vegetable food, chiefly mast. Most of the insects the Brown 

 Creeper is known to feed upon are injurious to trees and we may safely reckon 

 this small but very close associate of trees as one of their good friends. 



Dayton Stoner ( 1932) remarks : "Most of the insects taken are highly 

 destructive; and many of them and their eggs, and immature stages 

 as well, are so small as to be overlooked by the majority of arborial 

 birds. That this bird is a valuable ally of the forester and horticul- 

 turist cannot be doubted." 



Francis H. Allen sends us the following note : "Wlien feeding on the 

 ground or on hard snow, as it occasionally does, it hops with the legs 

 far apart and the body resting back on the tail, or apparently so. 

 The bird in this rather pert attitude looks very different from the 

 demure and rather humdrum creeper we usually see on the tree- 

 trunk." 



Behavior. — We think of the creeper as always climbing upward over 

 the bark in a straight or spiral course until, after reaching a fair 

 height on the trunk, he drops to the base of another tree to ascend 

 it in like manner. This is his ordinary way of feeding, but he often 

 varies it. We may sometimes see him take a short hop backward to re- 

 investigate a crevice in the bark, or take a hop sideways to broaden 

 the field of his research, and, as we have noted under "Nesting," a bird 

 may visit a slender branch and even perch on it, and he may also hitch 

 along the underside of a horizontal branch, his back to the ground. 

 Dr. Arthur P. Chadbourne (1905) speaks of a bird making "a hori- 

 zontal run sideways and most decidedly crablike," and A. Dawes Du- 

 Bois (MS.) notes the action of a creeper thus: "He proceeded up the 

 tree for a while, but soon began to search the branches, usually work- 

 ing outward from the trunk to the tip, and then flying back to the base 

 of another branch. He seemed more at home on the under side of a 



