I looked out the window the other day to see a mouse running up the tree out there. “Hold it”, I thought, “that’s not a mouse. It has a beak.”
Luckily my camera was nearby so I grabbed it and got these shots.
When I later tried to identify it, I tried ‘small brown bird with long pointed beak’. As you can imagine, there were quite a few of those to sift through. So I thought again about the search terms I was using, and recalled my first thoughts when I had seen the animal. ‘Bird that looks like a mouse’. Eureka … bird identified! I was clearly not the first person to think that.
What I had spotted was a bird called a ‘Brown Creeper’. They characteristically feed by creeping quickly up the sides of trees, spiraling around the trunk, finding small insects along the way. Then they fly back to the bottom of another tree and do it again.
Since it is springtime, this little bird was just passing through the city while migrating back to the northern forests for the summer.
Although I felt that the perfect shot alluded me, apparently I was lucky to get the photos that I did because, according to a bird photography site I checked out, they play hard to get.
I would love to know, have you ever seen a creeper? (The bird I mean, lol)
Thank you for dropping over.
xo loulou
[title credit : Gordon Lightfoot, Sundown]
