Brewer on the American Brown Creeper. 87 



pulled down to make the nest more comfortable, thus covering the 



The two eggs are dull white, with a scarcely perceptible yellowish 

 tinge. The surface is quite smooth, and has the appearance of 

 having been punctured with a fine point over the whole egg. They 

 are oblong-oval in shape, more pointed at one end. The smaller 

 measures 1.17. x 87 inches, the other is more pointed and measures 

 1.18 x .90 inches. Incubation was far advanced, and the embryos 

 were extracted with difficulty. 



Santa Cruz, Cal. 



Note. — To prevent confusion in respect to the history of the nidification 

 of this species, it may be well to state that the only previous account of its eggs 

 (given by Captain Charles Bendire in Proc. Bost. Soc. Nat. Hist., Vol. XIX, 

 1877, p. 232) was also based on those here described, — a fact unknown to Mr. 

 Cooper at the time his paper was written, and which became developed only by 

 subsequent correspondence with Mr. Cooper in relation to the matter. — J. A. A. 



THE AMERICAN BROWN CREEPER. 



BY T. M. BREWER. 



For a species so abundant at certain seasons, so widely dis- 

 tributed over North America, and so well known to all ornithologists, 

 there is, even at this day, a surprising amount of doubt, and a defi- 

 ciency of positive knowledge in regard to several points in the his- 

 tory of our common Creeper that are inferred rather than actually 

 known. I propose to touch upon a few of these. 



In " North American Birds " the Creeper is assigned a distribu- 

 tion from the Gulf of Mexico to high northern latitudes. This, of 

 course, does not mean Arctic regions, nor should it be understood 

 as including localities destitute of forests. An implied doubt has 

 been recently suggested as to the extent of its northern habitat, 

 merely because Audubon did not happen to meet with it in Labra- 

 dor, and because Richardson makes no mention of it in the " Fauna 

 Boreali-Americana." But no importance can be attached to this 

 silence. If Audubon did not meet with it in Labrador, it was prob- 

 ably because he explored very little of the land and none of the 

 forests, but other exploiters in Labrador have been more successful. 



