BROWN CREEPER. 
201 
than in othovs ; 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 Avith 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, Avhen 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 Aving 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 W^oodpeckers, l:)ut proportionably weaker in the shafts ; 
in many specimens the tail was very slightly marked with transverse 
undulating Avaves 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 
inch long, the fourth and fifth the longest, of a deep broAvnish black, 
and crossed about its middle with a curving band of rufous Avhite, a 
quarter of an inch in breadth, marking ten of the quills ; beloAv this 
the quills are exteriorly edged to within a little of their tips with rufous 
