As for the Pygmy, the pine tree is his home. It is not quite proper, however, to speak of this Nuthatch in the singular. Lilliputians must hunt in troops and make up in numbers what they lack in strength. Pygmy Nuthatches are not merely sociable; they are almost gregarious. Where a company of Kinglets would be content to straggle thru a dozen trees, a pack of Pygmies prefers to assemble in one. Yet there is no flock impulse here, as with Siskins. Each little elf is his own master, and a company of them is more like a crowd of merry schoolboys than anything else. It’s “come on fellers,” when one of the boys tires of a given tree, and sets out for another. The rest follow at leisure but are soon reassembled, and there is much jolly chatter with some good-natured scuffling, as the confederated mischiefs swarm over the new field of opportunity.

Nuthatches are not methodical, like Creepers, in their search for insects,—they are haphazard and happy. The branches are more attractive to them than the tree bole, and the dead top of the tree is most alluring of all. The Pygmies are never too busy to talk. The more they find the more excited their chatter grows, pretty lispings and chirpings quite too dainty for our dull ears. It makes us sigh to watch their happiness, and we go off muttering, “We, too, were young.”

Again, it shocks us when we find these youngsters in knickerbockers and braids paired off for nesting time. Tut, tut! children, so eager to taste life’s heavier joys? A nest is chiselled out with infinite labor on the part of these tiny beaks, in the dead portion of some pine tree. The cavity is from four to twelve inches in depth, with an entrance a trifle over an inch in diameter. The owners share the taste of the Chickadees, and prepare an elaborate layette of soft vegetable fibers, fur, hair, and feathers, in which the eggs are sometimes quite smothered.

The parents are as proud as peacocks, and well they may be, of their six or eight oval treasures, crystal white, with rufous frecklings, lavish or scant. When the babies are hatched, the mother goes in and out fearlessly under your very nose; and you feel such an interest in the little family that you pluck instinctively—but alas! with what futility—at the fastenings of your purse.

Certhiidæ—The Creepers

No. 114.
SIERRA CREEPER.

A. O. U. No. 726 d. Certhia familiaris zelotes Osgood.

Synonym.—California Creeper (Ridgway).

Description.—Adults: Above rusty brown, broadly and loosely streaked with ashy white; more finely and narrowly streaked on crown; rump bright russet; wing-quills crossed by two whitish bars, one on both webs near base, the other on outer webs alone; greater coverts, secondaries and tertials tipped with whitish or grayish buff; a narrow superciliary stripe dull whitish or brownish gray; underparts sordid white or pale buffy, tinged on sides and flanks with stronger buffy. Bill slender, decurved, brownish black above paler below; feet and legs brown; iris dark brown. Length of adult male about 5.50 (139.7); wing 2.50 (63.5); tail 2.39 (60.8); bill .63 (16); tarsus .59 (15). Female a little smaller.

Recognition Marks.—Warbler size; singularly variegated in modest colors above; the only brown creeper in its range. Lighter colored than the next.

Nesting.—Nest: of twigs, bark-strips, moss, plant-down, etc., crowded behind a warping scale of bark whether of cedar, pine or fir. Eggs: usually 5 or 6, sometimes 7 or 8, white or creamy white speckled and spotted with cinnamon brown or hazel, chiefly in wreath about larger end. Av. Size .61 × .47 (15.5 × 11.9).

General Range.—The Cascade-Sierra mountain system from Mt. Whitney north to central British Columbia, east to Idaho; displaced by succeeding form on Pacific Coast slope save from Marin County, California, southward.

Range in Washington.—Resident in the Cascade Mountains, east in coniferous timber to Idaho where intergrading with C. f. montana.

Authorities.—? Certhia familiaris montana Johnson (Roswell H.), Condor, Vol. VIII., Jan. 1906, p. 27.

Specimens.—U. of W. B.

People are always remonstrating with the bird-man for the assertion that birds are to be found everywhere if you but know them. Especially do they talk of the great silent forests on the western slopes of the Cascade Mountains, where they have traveled for forty miles at a stretch without seeing or hearing a living thing. Well; you cannot show me a square mile of woodland in all that area where at least the following species of birds may not be found: Western Winter Wren, Western Golden-crowned Kinglet, Western Flycatcher, Varied Thrush and California Creeper[46]; and these, except the Flycatcher, at any season of the year. Silent birds they are for the most part, but each gives vent to a characteristic cry by which it may be known.

The Creeper is, par excellence, the bird of the forest. To him alone the very bigness of the trees is of the greatest service; for his specialty is bark, and the more bark there is the harder is this little atom to distinguish. Not only does he inhabit the deeper forests of the Cascade ranges and foothills, but his domain stretches eastward across the northern tier of pine-clad counties, and he is common among the tamaracks on the banks of the Pend d’Oreille.

In June, in the Stehekin Valley of Chelan County, we found these Creepers leading about troops of fully grown young. A recently occupied nest was disclosed to us by a few twigs sticking out from behind a curled-up bark scale of a fire-killed tree, near the Cascade trail. The twigs proved to be eighteen inches below the top of the nest proper, which was thus about twelve feet from the ground. The intervening space was filled in loosely with twigs, bark-strips, moss, cotton, and every other sort of woodsy loot. The mass was topped by a crescent-shaped cushion over an inch in thickness, deeply hollowed in the center, six inches from horn to horn, and four and a half from bole to bark; and this cushion was composed entirely of soft inner bark-strips and a vegetable fiber resembling flax in quality—altogether a splendid creation.