Birding Notes

Soon after sunrise on the Winter Solstice, in the late days of December, I stepped out onto our deck. The morning was clear and chilly, about 31 degrees by our porch thermometer. A light frost touched the grass and leaves here and there. The pale parchment leaves on a young beech tree at the edge of the woods glowed softly in the shadow of grim bare-limbed oaks and gray-green pines. 

The first sound I heard was the high, hissing trill of a Brown Creeper, a bird that has become very uncommon here in our neighborhood. It was a fine way to begin this Solstice day, and if I were inclined to believe in omens for the coming year, the Brown Creeper would be a good one.

A Brown Creeper is a tiny brown and white bird that – true to its name – creeps up the trunk of a tree, pausing to pry up the bark with its long, thin, down-curved bill, searching for its prey, mostly insects and spiders. Its short legs and long tail keep it so close to the trunk that it looks insect-like as it moves in a jerky upward spiral. The mottled brown and white plumage on its upper side camouflages it so well it can be hard to spot. Its underside is white. It will move in this spiral direction up the trunk of one tree for a long way, until at some point it flies off and directly down to the base of a nearby tree and begins to scuttle up again.

Its high, quiet call is not easily noticed, but in the cold, still air of a winter morning, it rings in a shimmering way, often compared to the sound of a thin chain dropping into a pile. And its call was the only sign I could find of the elusive little Creeper today, though I searched the trunks of all the trees and watched for several minutes. 

In winter, Brown Creepers often travel in loose feeding flocks with other small birds, so it wasn’t a surprise to also hear the high, thin ti-ti-ti calls of a Golden-crowned Kinglet, the delicate rattle of a Downy Woodpecker, and the chatter of Tufted Titmice and Carolina Chickadees. A Northern Cardinal peeped, an Eastern Phoebe called repeated tsups, American Crows cawed in the distance, and a Carolina Wren sang a brilliant song.

By late afternoon, when I found the time to get out for a walk, high gray clouds had rolled in and thickened, creating a very gray early evening, moody and somber in feel. The air felt cool and almost completely still. And at first, very quiet.

Then a Hairy Woodpecker’s bright, emphatic rattle came from somewhere in trees right around our cul de sac. As I walked on down the road, I began to hear the peeps of Northern Cardinals, the songs and trills of Carolina Wrens, the chatter of Carolina Chickadees. Birds were – as usual in the past many weeks – few and far between, and much more often heard than seen. A Ruby-crowned Kinglet stuttered its jidit-jidit from a hidden spot in some tall, dense shrubs. A Red-bellied Woodpecker chuck-chucked, a Northern Flicker called a bright Kleer!

In one stretch of the road lined with young live oaks, I could hear the tseets of White-throated Sparrows on the ground below them, and caught glimpses of two plump, streaked birds as they dived for cover under shrubs. Yellow-rumped Warblers flitted from tree to tree, scattering check calls. A White-breasted Nuthatch’s nasal ank-ank and the trumpeted traveling call of a Pileated Woodpecker both came from a distance. Two small, swift flocks of birds flew over that might have been blackbirds, or not, quickly out of sight. A Hermit Thrush murmured its liquid churp from a low branch in a bare maple tree too far back from the road to see well.

The sun went down with little flourish, leaving a sky thick with high, sooty clouds and only a faint tinge of orange. As I walked back home, I listened to the peeps of Northern Cardinals and the clink calls of White-throated Sparrows. Light faded fast. A White-throated Sparrow’s sweet, clear, whistled song spiraled up from some low, screened spot not too far away.