Those of us living in the Pacific Northwest of the United States are quite accustomed to seeing ghost birds while we are walking in the forest during wintertime. While strolling among the massive trunks of the Douglas Firs and the Western Hemlocks we not infrequently get a quick glimpse of what we think is a nuthatch clinging to the bark of one of these giants; however when we turn to get a closer look, the bird we thought we saw vanishes as if it was never there at all. In fact it was there but it wasn’t a nuthatch – it was a Brown Creeper, Certhia americana.
Brown Creepers define the word “cryptic” almost as well as the notorious Pauraque, Nyctidromus albicollis, a member of which species I nearly stepped on, so well did it blend into the fallen leaves lying all about the ground, while birding in the south Rio Grande Valley of Texas. The calls of Brown Creepers often ring our clearly as they forage upward along the trunks of the giant evergreens but, thanks to their camouflage patterning of soft greys and browns, they can be dashedly difficult to spot against the identically patterned and shadowed bark, and even more difficult to photograph.
While this is not a perfect photograph, it is one of the best I could manage. Every time I thought I had the bird in focus for many successive frames, almost all of them turned out to be somewhat soft and blurry. My mistake seems to have been that I was trying to focus the image seen through the camera’s lens on the bird’s cryptically and deceptively patterned back rather than on a less visually complex area such as its beak. The fact that these little birds are far more thick when clinging to a tree than they appear (they look just like little footballs in profile) only makes the matter worse. Truly, these are challenging birds to photograph.
Peace and good bird watching.
