A Brown Creeper works fungus

 

A Brown Creeper (Certhia americana) works the plated bark of a Loblolly Pine (Pinus taeda). 

My last day of my recent foray to the Delmarva Peninsula was epic, both for the length of the "workday" and the myriad cool observations. I left my hotel in Lewes, Delaware well before dawn, and drove the 1.5 hours to Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, arriving shortly after dawn. This was a Monday (by design) as weekdays typically have far less visitation than weekends. Blackwater features a nice driving loop, and driving loops are very popular. The downside of traffic is near constant interruptions on a busy day, which can really hamper photography.

I drove in a short distance, parked, got my gear ready and set out on foot. Walking this driving trail - at least the section near the beginning - is far more productive than driving. Cars are pretty good isolation tanks, and ensconced within a vehicle makes it much harder to spot subjects, and certainly harder to hear them.

While working a roving band of Brown-headed Nuthatches (a post on those in the future, hopefully), a flicker of movement nearby caught my eye. A Brown Creeper, only about 20 feet away and working the trunk of a large Loblolly Pine! This common species - at least in migration and winter, south of its core breeding range - can be a challenge to photograph well. I instantly shifted focus to the creeper and angled for some shots. The image above is of the type that shows the bird's physiology well.

The creeper pokes under a plate of bark, seeking spiders or small insects. When against tree bark they blend extraordinarily well with their surroundings. This crypsis combined with their typically fast and jerky movements can make them a challenge for photographers.

While shooting this bird, I had noticed a few small patches of Orange Oyster mushrooms (Phyllotopsis nidulans) on a nearby Loblolly Pine trunk, about eye level. If only the creeper would move to that tree! I started doing my best to will it over there, thinking/hoping if it did visit the mushroom tree, it might also investigate the mushrooms.

Voila! I was pleased indeed when the creeper flutter-dropped to the base of the mushroom tree and began working its way upward as a creeper nearly always does. This trajectory would put him/her (sexes are identical or nearly so) on a direct path to the oysters. And bingo! As soon as the creeper reached them it paused briefly, then jumped up to latch on to one of the fungi.

I was hammering my shutter button, hardly able to believe this stroke of creeperesque luck! The bird was probably 25 feet or so away, tops, and I was armed with my Canon R5 attached to the Canon 800mm f/5.6. Not only that but the 1.4x extender was mounted, giving the rig 1120mm of reach. More is usually better when it comes to birds, and I had to do very little cropping with these images.

NOTE: Until the R5 I'd had little luck using extenders on the 800. I could never dial them in - nor could a professional - to tack sharpness. I know that extenders will cause some image degradation - shooting through more glass probably always will - but the 1.4x has not rendered image degradation that's really discernable on my lesser telephotos and it was nearly permanently attached to my 500 f/4 II when I had that. But it mostly works like a champ on the R5, perhaps because of that mirrorless camera's amazing autofocus system. Still, the closer to the subject the better the images - more distant subjects do not hold up quite as well.

This wasn't this creeper's first time at the mushroom rodeo I'd guess, as it quickly started probing into the gills under the caps. I became very interested in what the bird might be extracting, and soon found out at least in a general way. It was, often after much rooting around, pulling out tiny larvae - far too small to show up well in images. I suspect they were of beetles, or possibly flies or even caterpillars. One shot, when highly enlarged, seemed to show three pairs of thoracic prolegs and some median prolegs as a moth caterpillar would have. But the dietary subjects remain a mystery to me.

For a photographer or keen birder interested in behavior (I would be both), this situation was manna from creeper heaven. The fungi were of great interest to the bird, and I probably had a total of ten minutes with it at the mushrooms. So alluring were they that after "leaving" and me preparing to move on down the road, it suddenly reappeared and gave me a few more minutes.

The Brown Creeper strikes a pose. This was one of the photographic highlights of my trip and certainly an unexpected bonus. It does pay to strike out on foot, even when a convenient driving loop might be a temptation to remain in the vehicle. I almost certainly would not have picked up on this situation had I been in the vehicle.

Can it get any better? At one point a Carolina Wren popped up onto the mushrooms. It probed around a bit, but not with the gusto and sense of purpose of the creeper. My hunch is that the curious wren - they miss nothing! - observed the creeper at the mushrooms and decided to investigate. It was not tuned in to whatever the larvae that the creeper was eating and didn't stay long. But long enough to give me a nice series of images on a particularly alluring substrate.

After Blackwater NWR, I headed 15 minutes north to the legendary Oakley Street and Choptank River in Cambridge, Maryland. There I photographed ducks until late in the day (hope to make a post about that later), then headed home to Worthington, Ohio, arriving around midnight. I'm still not done going through the piles of images that I made on this six-day trip but have been quite pleased with what I've seen so far.

If you're interested in a good immersion to the coastal regions of the Delmarva Peninsula, check out the Delmarva Birding Weekends. Expert-led trips while produce lots of birds - and seals! - and the guides and organizers are superb sources of information regarding the various honey holes on the peninsula.