Laura Erickson’s For the Birds

I fell truly madly deeply in love with Brown Creepers in 1978, when I was a teacher at St. James School in Madison, Wisconsin. The creeper’s subdued loveliness and shy ways were plenty enough to make this one of my favorite birds, but falling in love is far deeper and more personal.

One morning when I arrived at school, our janitor brought me a creeper that had collided with a window. It had a sprained wing, so it remained in my classroom for several days.

I’ll never forget holding that tiny mite for the first time—its forward-facing eyes, an adaptation to give it binocular close-range vision as it looks into the tiny crevices in tree bark, looked directly into my own eyes. After collisions, many birds seem unusually tame, but this one was alert—simply very calm. During the following days, as it grew stronger and started flying, it never once acted fearful. That word Winsor Merritt Tyler used to describe the Brown Creeper, “sentient,” seemed true and apt.

We kept the window shades in my classroom pulled at all times so it wouldn’t crash again. My students bought mealworms at a local pet shop, and we set up several fairly large tree limbs here and there in the classroom where it could perch and hitch its way up. But in this unfamiliar habitat, the little bird didn’t limit itself to those woody substrates—many times it alighted on a student’s or my ankle and hitched its way up a knee sock, trouser, or pantyhose-covered leg.

After several days, when it was easily flying from one limb, human or arboreal, to another without getting grounded, it was time to release it, so the class took a walk to a nearby wooded park with the little creeper in a shoebox.

When we reached a good spot in the midst of lots of large trees, I opened the box. I expected that it would instantly take off, but no—it let me pick it up out of the box and hold it momentarily as it looked all around, studying its surroundings with interest. I handed it to one of my students who held her arm out and opened her fingers. The little bird kept studying the trees and all of us gathered around it even as her hand was wide open.

After at least 30 seconds and possibly as long as a minute, it flew to the base of the nearest tree, just four or five feet away. We watched it leisurely hitch its way up, opening its bill a few times to snap up microscopic insects. Then it moved to another, equally close tree to do the same. We watched it climb that tree, and another, and another, in no hurry to get away from us. We weren’t in any hurry to get away from it, either. But little by little, it worked its way deeper into the woods, and finally we lost sight of it. I whispered, “Live long and prosper,” and we trudged back to school.

Not one of us cried, at least not obviously. How could we not feel sad to say farewell to our pleasant little friend even as we were genuinely thrilled that we had saved its life and returned it to its natural home? For homework, I told the kids to look up the word “ambivalent.” I bet they still remember what it means.