BROWN CREEPER. 201 



than in otliers; but sometimes this superiority belonged to a male, 

 sometimes to a female, and appeared to be entirely owing to difference 

 in age. I found, however, a remarkable and very striking difference 

 in their sizes ; some were considerably larger, and had the bill at least 

 one-third longer and stronger than the others, and these I uniformly 

 found to be males. I also received two of these birds from the country 

 bordering on the Cayuga lake, in New York state, from a person who 

 killed them from the tree in which they had their nest. The male of 

 this pair had the bill of the same extraordinary size with several others 

 I had examined before, the plumage in every respect the same. Other 

 males, indeed, were found at the same time of the usual size. Whether 

 this be only an accidental variety, or whether the male, when full 

 grown, be naturally so much larger than the female (as is the case with 

 many birds), and takes several years in arriving at his full size, I can- 

 not positively determine, though I think the latter most probable. 



The Brown Creeper builds his nest in the hollow trunk or branch of a 

 tree, where the tree has been shivered, or a limb broken off, or where 

 squirrels or Woodpeckers have wrought out an entrance : for nature has 

 not provided him with the means of excavating one for himself. I have 

 known the female begin to lay by the seventeenth of April. The eggs 

 are usually seven, of a dull cinereous, marked with small dots of reddish 

 yellow, and streaks of dark brown. The young come forth with great 

 caution, creeping about long before they venture on wing. From the 

 early season at which they begin to build, I have no doubts of their 

 raising two broods during summer, as I have seen the old ones entering 

 holes late in July. 



The length of this bird is five inches, and nearly seven from the 

 extremity of one wing to that of the other ; the upper part of the head 

 is of a deep brownish black ; the back brown, and both streaked with 

 white, the plumage of the latter being of a loose texture, with its 

 filaments not adhering ; the white is in the centre of every feather, and 

 is skirted with brown ; lower part of the back, rump, and tail-coverts, 

 rusty brown, the last minutely tipped with whitish ; the tail is as long 

 as the body, of a light drab color, with the inner webs dusky, and con- 

 sists of twelve quills each sloping off and tapering to a point in the 

 manner of the Woodpeckers, but proportion ably weaker in the shafts ; 

 in many specimens the tail was very slightly marked with transverse 

 undulating waves of dusky, scarce observable ; the two middle feathers 

 the longest, the others on each side shortening by one-sixth of an inch 

 to the outer one ; the wing consists of nineteen feathers, the first an 

 incli long, the fourth and fifth the longest, of a deep brownish bkck, 

 and crossed about its middle with a curving band of rufous white, a 

 quarter of an inch in breadth, marking ten of the quills ; below this 

 the quills are exteriorly edged to within a little of their tips with rufous 



