Treecreeper

With the weather forecast to deteriorate steadily through the day I thought that it wouldn't be sensible to stray too far from home, so I just went over to Charlecote and walked around the park. It was heavily overcast and bitterly cold, with a vicious wind, but luckily the predicted sleet held off, so things could have been worse.

I'd just turned up the carriage drive in West Park when I spotted this Treecreeper flying from one tree to the next, and because it was completely engaged in its search for food and wasn't worried about me, I managed to get quite close before it moved too far above my head for acceptable photos. The problem in shooting these little birds is that they're very quick and restless, and very well-camouflaged against the tree bark on which they hunt, so you end up taking a lot of frames and having to discard at least 90% of them due to missed focus or motion blur. In this case I took maybe a hundred images, and six have turned out to be worth keeping, of which this is the best. I'm a little conflicted about that dead spur: my better instincts are telling me to leave it alone because nature photography should tell the story as it was, but on the other hand this isn't a competition shot and the spur is distracting, so at some point I might reprocess the file and remove it.

The Treecreeper is roughly the size of a Blue Tit at about 12.5cm long, with a wingspan of 18-20cm, and weighing around 10g. The average lifespan is just two years, with cold, wet winters being especially damaging - though overall the UK population is thought to be stable, at over 200,000 breeding pairs. It mainly eats invertebrates, which it collects from crevices in the bark of both deciduous and coniferous trees, but in winter it will also eat conifer seeds. It's a relatively sedentary bird, and mainly solitary outside the breeding season, though on winter nights groups of Treecreepers will sometimes roost together for warmth. On their own they will sleep in small tree crevices, and in forests containing Wellingtonia redwoods they've been filmed excavating little scrapes out of the soft bark, into which they press themselves overnight.