CREEPERS: MEXICAN CREEPER 
527 
feet from an occupied cottage, foraged from fifty to eighty feet from 
the ground in about twenty large pine trees, feeding from half a minute 
to eight minutes, and making, as was estimated, three hundred trips 
a day, in distance about thirty miles (1924, pp. 31-32). 
Pygmies were abundant on the northerly slopes of the Animas 
Mountains in early August, 1908, Major Goldman says, from 6,800 
feet to the summit, “usually seen in small flocks, busily and noisily 
searching for food among the leaves and small twigs of oaks or pines. 
Sometimes parts of the same flock would occupy two or three trees 
at once, the birds keeping near together as the flock moved along’ 7 
(MS). 
In the Gallinas Mountains, before the cold snap of October 9, 1904, 
the voice of the Pygmy had been one of the commonest we heard 
among the yellow pines, but after that it was not noticed until in 
going down out of the mountains on October 11 we found it in the nut 
pine and juniper belt, at a pleasanter temperature. 
Eminently social, as fall approaches, Mr. Henshaw says, small 
bands of Pygmies, titmice, and warblers, all on the best of terms with 
one another, gather together until “their number often reaches the 
hundreds, and the trees seem fairly alive with the merry party, while 
the loud querulous weet-weet of the Nuthatches, which is constantly 
repeated as they move along the branches or fly from tree to tree, is 
always conspicuous among the softer notes of the warblers and other 
species. At this season they descended from the pine region, and are 
often seen in the groves of evergreen oaks” (1875, p. 176). 
Among the conifers at Chama, during late December, 1893, Mr. 
Loring found the Nuthatch flocks feeding both in the trees and on the 
ground. 
CREEPERS: Family Certhiidae 
Subfamily Certhiinae 
The Creepers spend most of their time creeping up tree trunks 
picking insects out of the bark—never hanging head down as do the 
Nuthatches—and in addition to the disguise of their white-streaked, 
brown plumage are remarkably adapted to the life. Their bills are 
long, slender, sharp, and decurved for reaching the insects in the 
bark, and their claws are sharp and much curved for clinging to it, 
while their long, elastic tails have rigid, pointed tips like those of a 
woodpecker for bracing against the trunk of the tree. 
MEXICAN CREEPER: Certhia famili&ris albescens Berlepsch 
Description. — Length: (Skin) about 4.6-5.1 inches, wing 2.4-2.5, tail 2.2-2.5, 
bill .5-6, tarsus .5-.0. Female about the same. Adults: Upperparts blackish, 
head and back conspicuously streaked with white, rump chestnut, primary coverts 
not tipped with white; underparts brownish gray. 
