I saw something really creepy at Ft. Ancient yesterday...

...a Brown Creeper--one of my favorite winter birds! I love the high-pitched peeping noises these tiny little pieces of moving bark make. Perfectly camouflaged, they are sometime hard to spot.

I am the tree...

Sunday, when Rick and Matty took off for hockey games in Columbus, I took off for Ft. Ancient. Hoping to catch a few new winter birds, I picked up the Mound Trail through the meadow by the bird blind. The leaf cover on the ground was heavy, and I had to slow down several times to inch my way across the ground because I was making more ruckus than one person should be able to make! At one point I came to a complete stop to just listen, and as I did, the woods seemed to come to life with the peeping of Brown Creepers. I would hear one to the right....another to the left...one far away...close...behind me....and on and on. It was as if 50 birds were hiding on 50 different trees, calling to each other and making sure they remained invisible to me. Finally I started seeing movement as a bird would leave one tree and fly down to the bottom of another. I was able to keep track of eight birds at this time, but one bird I couldn't find. He was very, very close, but I couldn't seem to track his call, then suddenly he appeared! The little wood chip materialized right in front of me and almost seemed to pause for the camera!

I don't often get a chance to photograph these masters of camouflage. They move up the tree so fast and jump from here to there. I usually just watch them through the binocs. I like how he's following the angle of the bark here.

I thought he might stop and look in the hole, but he didn't. He was too busy looking for bugs to bother with an empty hole...for heaven's sake...

...and it's a good thing he didn't because if you look closely, you can see a big fat bug in his bill, which he found and ate shortly after passing the hole. Eww...creepy!

Click here for one of my earliest posts. It's about a Brown Creeper and the info about him from my first "field guide" from 1968, "Teach Me About Birds--Flash Cards in Full Color!" (The cards are gorgeous, and have really cool facts. I loved them back then when I was just in the first grade. )

For posts about Fort Ancient, click here. Fort Ancient is located in Warren County in Ohio and is on a gorgeous wooded plateau perched 245 feet above the Little Miami River. It is the largest prehistoric earthen hilltop enclosure in the United States. Built 2000 years ago by Mound Builders, the earth walls stretch 3.5 miles, enclosing over 100 acres of hilltop. Mound Builders used small baskets to move more than 553,000 cubic yards of soil to form the earthen walls that reach from 4 to 23 feet in height. Amazingly, most of the earthworks are still visible and retain the same form they had over 2000 years ago! Archeologists estimate it took about 400 years (100BC – 290AD) to build the entire complex.

Check out Bird Photography Weekly to see birds from all over the world.

Teach Me about Birds, Flash Cards in Full Color...revisited!

The little Brown Creeper was such a cool bird I thought it deserved a Teach Me about Birds, Flash Cards in Full Color check, and sure enough, one was in the box! Here is the Brown Creeper flash card from 1968 (my first field guide),


…and even more interesting, on the back of the flash card was the best description ever,

...a small, five-inch, mouse-like bird that climbs up trees in a spiral.

“Mouse-like bird” is such a perfect description. I don’t understand why it’s not in any of the contemporary guides. As I read further, I came across something else new,

Feeds on tiny destructive insects that it finds in the bark of trees. The bird’s pure-white breast may help to reflect light into the darker nooks.

Well that’s cool. None of the current guides talk about the breast reflection thing, so naturally, I started thinking about the white-breasted nuthatch and wondered if they used the same logic with that bird, and sure enough, they did. Here is the flash card,

…and here is the description,

A sturdy, little, 5 to 6 inch, grey tree-trunk acrobat (again a totally cute description). The white breast helps to reflect light into crevices in the bark it searches.

So there we go. Why is this little tidbit missing from today’s guides? Is it no longer valid, or just not deemed important. Whether it’s true or not now, it was in 1968, and that was a pretty good year!

First Bird Guide

I started this blog from the very beginning, so I guess I’ll continue with that thread. We all have first bird memories. Here are a few of mine (let me know yours!). My mom and dad (Joni and Jerry) gave me a deck of bird flash cards when I was a kid, and that pretty much sealed the deal on my birdophilia. The cards came in a box called Teach me about Birds, Flash Cards in Full Color. I still have them. Notice “Red” on the cover?

As an aside, Aunt Pat and Uncle John sighted two Eastern Bluebirds at their little get-away cabin in Ripley (Brown County, OH) on New Year’s Day. We are calling it a good omen and doubly so, two Bluebirds of Happiness on the first day of the year can only mean good things are comin’. Oh, and look Aunt Pat, there's a nice flash card of the Eastern Bluebird for you ...and to honor Aunt Diane for being my first follower and making the first comment, a Back-capped Chickadee and a Brown Pelican flash card! ...and mom, the American Bald Eagle flash card was suspiciously missing from the deck. Would you happen to know where it is?