Winter Wrens and Creepers

     A 40-yard, ragged row of bare, young silver maple trees stood along a sluggish stream in a cow pasture.  They were silhouetted against gray, orange-spotted clouds and reflected in the quiet waterway, making a beautiful portrait of trees, sky and water in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania farmland. 
     Those young maple trees made a thin peninsula jutting into the meadow from a nearby patch of woods.  Sometimes those maples harbor woodland birds and birds of thickets and overgrown pastures.  I've seen American robins, eastern bluebirds and Baltimore orioles among those trees at different seasons.  Thicket birds, including permanent resident song sparrows and northern cardinals and summering gray catbirds have been among them.  And such permanent resident, woodland birds as blue jays, Carolina chickadees, red-bellied woodpeckers and summering wood thrushes are sometimes among those maples as well.  And because of a small bridge spanning a country road between the woods and the meadow, a pair of eastern phoebes nests on a support beam under the bridge in summer.
     And on January 18, 2017, I was excited to see a winter wren and a brown creeper, both small, woodland birds, along the stream and among the young maples respectively, and nearly at the same time.  Both species are woodland nesters, but farther north and west of Lancaster County.  They are here only in winter.  And they are solitary birds when spotted in winter woods, or another habitat.
     Winter wrens are three and one quarter inches long, and have beautiful, warm-brown feathering with dark barring that blends them into their surroundings of woodland floors.  They also have comically stubby, upright tails that help identify them.  They raise young in bottomland forests around the Great Lakes, in New England and down the Appalachian Mountains to North Carolina and Tennessee.  
     Winter wrens mostly creep along the shores of streams in woods like feathered mice or gnomes, all day, every day, during winter, including here in Lancaster County.  There they poke into stream bank crannies, behind tree roots jutting out from those banks, and among fallen leaves and logs on woodland floors to seize and ingest still active, or dormant, invertebrates.  And winter wrens spend winter nights snug in sheltering crannies behind tree roots in stream banks and under fallen logs.    
     Brown creepers nest along the Appalachians south to North Carolina and Tennessee, across the mixed forests of Canada to the pacific Coast, and down the Rocky Mountains to Mexico.  Creepers are four and three-quarters inches long, brown on top, streaked with white dots, and white below.  The mottled brown and white feathering on top camouflages these birds against tree bark.  Creepers have curved beaks they poke into bark crevices after invertebrates and stiff points on their tail feathers that prop them upright on tree trunks.  Like all life forms, creepers are well built for what they do to get food.
     Brown creepers winter in woods, hedgerows of trees, and older suburban areas with their many maturing trees.  Each bird hitches up tree trunks to investigate cracks in bark for invertebrates and their eggs.  Near the top of every tree, the creeper flutters down to the base of another tree, then spirals up it as well.  All day, every day of its life, the creeper flutters to the bases of trees and spirals up them, one at a time, as it searches for food along the way.  And every day of its life, each creeper spends nights in a cozy tree cavity or behind a sheltering strip of loose bark on a tree. 
     Winter wrens and brown creepers are small, brown birds that hunt invertebrates in woods during winter, but in different ways and in different niches, eliminating competition for food between them.  And because of that lack of rivalry for food, these two species can live in the same woods at the same time.  Because of their blending into their surroundings for safety, they are hard for us to spot.  But it is a bit exciting when they are seen.