Bird of the Month: Treecreeper
John Mcewen
‘I like the treecreeper [ Certhia familiaris] for being the right-way-up counterpart of the meaner-looking nuthatch, for being such a perfect little packet of form and function, and for being so delightfully, precisely, white and brown; I love that whiteness. Also, as a very inadequate bird person, I was excited when I read an expert say that he had never found a treecreeper’s nest – and we have had two here! In the cracks that open at the corner of an old wooden barn,’ writes my nephew John R H Mcewen from Berwickshire. Treecreepers ascend tree trunks; nuthatches descend.
As W H Hudson wrote in British Birds, ‘The little creeper appears to move more in a groove than almost any other passerine bird, and is the most monotonous in its life; yet it never fails to interest, doubtless because in its appearance and actions it differs so much from other species…
‘It is more of a parasite on the trees that furnish it with food than any other bird of similar habits. Nutchatches and woodpeckers are not so dependent on their trade; their habits and diet vary to some extent with the seasons and the conditions they exist in.’
The BBC’S Springwatch has shown that the diet of the great spotted woodpecker even includes treecreeper chicks.
Winter is when one notices the bird most. Gerry Cambridge gives it pride of place in Aves, the collection of his bird poems:
It was always the frosty nights he’d search For shivering mites of feathered brown, Intricately barred, hid in the Wellingtonia’s Hollowed bark, heads and beaks tucked safely in; When out in the fields of dark All that grew was ice Over the stones and ditches, And no one behind lit curtains guessed At his concentration in the crystalled grass,
Happed in his puffs of breath Steadying the penlight torch Discovering those birds at roost In the great tree’s kindly bark.
Autumn 1853 was when Cornish planthunter William Lobb, of the globally unrivalled Veitch Nurseries, returned to England with the seeds of the ‘big tree’ or ‘vegetable monster’ he had discovered in California’s Sierra Nevada.
Who was to have the honour of naming it? Lobb knew he had to act quickly to beat American horticulturists. He also knew the tree would trigger a frenzy of planting in Britain. The great botanist John Lindley, saviour and director of Kew Gardens, was assigned the scientific task and called it Wellingtonia gigantea after the Iron Duke, recently dead. The subsequent transatlantic row was resolved only when a general scientific name, Sequoiadendron giganteum, was agreed.
In Britain, the growing spree Lobb predicted means there are now substantial Wellingtonias, of all trees the one best suited to treecreepers. This is because the deeply grooved bark is soft, light and chunky, offering abundant warmth and shelter, with the tree’s drooping branches providing a tent. The bird’s 200,000 population is stable, with a pronounced recent increase in Ireland.