Brown Creeper

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Brown Creeper

Scientific classification

Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Aves
Order:	Passeriformes
Family:	Certhidae
Genus:	Certhia
Species:	C. americana

Binomial name

Certhia americana
Bonaparte, 1838

The Brown Creeper (Certhia americana), also known as the American Tree Creeper, is a small songbird, the only North American member of the treecreeper family Certhiidae.

Adults are brown on the upperparts with light spotting, resembling a piece of tree bark, with white underparts. They have a long thin bill with a slight downward curve and a long tail.

Their breeding habitat is mature forests, especially conifers, in Canada, Alaska and the northeastern and western United States. They make a partial cup nest under a piece of bark partially detached from the tree, sometimes in a tree cavity.

They are permanent residents through much of their range; many northern birds migrate further south to the United States.

They forage on tree trunks and branches, creeping slowly with their body flattened against the bark, typically circling up the tree, sometimes feeding on the ground. They mainly eat insects, sometimes seeds in winter.

The song is a short series of high-pitched sees.

As a migratory species with a northern range, this species is a conceivable vagrant to western Europe. However, it is intermediate in its characteristics between Common Treecreeper and Short-toed Treecreeper, and has sometimes in the past been considered a subspecies of the former, although its closest relative seems to be the latter (Tietze et al., 2006).

Since the two European treecreepers are themselves among the most difficult species on that continent to distinguish from each other, a Brown Creeper would probably not even be suspected, other than on a treeless western island, and would be difficult to verify even then.

Brown Creeper has occurred as a vagrant to Bermuda.

[edit] References

BirdLife International (2004). Certhia americana. 2006 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. IUCN 2006. Retrieved on 12 May 2006. Database entry includes justification for why this species is of least concern
Tietze, Dieter Thomas; Martens, Jochen & Sun, Yue-Hua (2006): Molecular phylogeny of treecreepers (Certhia) detects hidden diversity. Ibis 148(3): 477-488 DOI:doi:10.1111/j.1474-919X.2006.00547.x (HTML abstract)