Brown Creeper

The Chicago area is a winter home for brown creepers.  Streaked brown above, they blend into the large tree trunks as they creep upward searching for insects and spiders hidden in tree bark.  Brown creepers have a "decurved", or downward curving bill.

It's been surprising that I've seen insects almost every day it's been in the 40s F.  There was a cloud of midges (I think) after the snowstorm last week, and a moth flying around a couple days ago.  This morning I saw the brown creeper with an insect it dug out of the bark.

Headed out at 8 am to avoid rain.  Say what you want about weather forecasters, but weather.com has been highly accurate on the hourly forecast.  Today it called for light rain by 10 am (yup, started at 945 am). Yesterday it forecast completely cloudy by 3 pm (yes, clouded over at 240 pm).

I plan to get high contrast less noisy photos of brown creepers in sunlight this winter.