THE SIERRA CREEPER. 295 
and braids paired off for nesting time. ‘Tut, tut! children, so eager to taste 
life’s heavier joys? A nest is chiselled out with infinite labor on the part 
of these tiny beaks, in the dead portion of some pine tree. The cavity is 
from four to twelve inches in depth, with an entrance a trifle over an inch 
in diameter. ‘The owners share the taste of the Chickadees, and prepare 
an elaborate layette of soft vegetable fibers, fur, hair, and feathers, in 
which the eggs are sometimes quite smothered. 
The parents are as proud as peacocks, and well they may be, of their 
six or eight oval treasures, crystal white, with rufous frecklings, lavish 
or scant. When the babies are hatched, the mother goes in and out fear- 
lessly under your very nose; and you feel such an interest in the little family 
that you pluck instinctively—but alas! with what futility—at the fastenings 
of your purse. 
No. 114. 
SIERRA CREEPER. 
A. O. U. No. 726d. Certhia familiaris zelotes Osgood. 
Synonym.—CatiForNIA CREEPER (Ridgway). 
Description 4dults: Above rusty brown, broadly and loosely streaked 
with ashy white; more finely and narrowly streaked on crown; rump bright 
russet; wing-quills crossed by two whitish bars, one on both webs near base, 
the other on outer webs alone; greater coverts, secondaries and tertials tipped 
with whitish or grayish buff; a narrow superciliary stripe dull whitish or brown- 
ish gray; underparts sordid white or pale buffy, tinged on sides and flanks with 
stronger buffy. Bill slender, decurved, brownish black above paler below; feet 
and legs brown; iris dark brown. Length of adult male about 5.50 (139.7); 
wing 2.50 (63.5); tail 2.39 (60.8); bill .63 (16); tarsus .59 (15). Female a 
little smaller. 
Recognition Marks.—Warbler size; singularly variegated in modest colors 
above; the only brown creeper in its range. Lighter colored than the next. 
Nesting.—Nest: of twigs, bark-strips, moss, plant-down, etc., crowded be- 
hind a warping scale of bark whether of cedar, pine or fir. Eggs: usually 5 or 6, 
sometimes 7 or 8, white or creamy white speckled and spotted with cinnamon 
brown or hazel, chiefly in wreath about larger end. Av. Size .61x.47 (15.5x 
L0.Q)))- 
General Range.—The Cascade-Sierra mountain system from Mt. Whitney 
north to central British Columbia, east to Idaho; displaced by succeeding form 
on Pacific Coast slope save from Marin County, California, southward. 
Range in Washington.—Resident in the Cascade Mountains, east in coni- 
ferous timber to Idaho where intergrading with C. f. montana. 
Authorities.— ? Certhia familiaris montana Johnson (Roswell H.), Condor, 
Vol. VIII., Jan. 1906, p. 27. 
Specimens.—U. of W. B. 
