Wallcreeper

September 10 2015. Hampshire England.  I am so excited about this that I’m not sure quite where to start. Perhaps if I blurt it out: My uncle, a country-man of advanced years but keen eye and secure in his identification of birds, saw a Wallcreeper yesterday, here in southern England. That’s the story. 

And so what? Well, it wasn’t my sighting. But I’m okay with that, there’s precedent, I celebrated a couple of my son’s bird sightings some three or more years ago: a Cock of the Rock in Peru and Andean Condors in Peru. Also, Wallcreepers are excruciatingly rare in the UK. Among those birders who would drop everything and drive across country regardless of domestic or employment consequences, a Wallcreeper is worth risking everything for; it’s sensational.

In size and shape a Wallcreeper is a bit like the familiar Brown Creeper of North America or Treecreeper of Eurasia (perhaps a touch larger) but much prettier and far, far more elusive. Wallcreepers favour mountain ranges with bleak, towering rock-faces where they inconspicuously work the crevices and cracks in search of insects. Birders seeking to add a Wallcreeper to their life-list must spend their days in the Pyrenees or Alps praying for a glimpse. Shaded rather like a nuthatch, it is a generally greyish bird, inconspicuous as it moves quietly around the sheer cliff faces but, as my Birds of Europe field guide notes, “…. when shifting position the broad rounded wings are spread, gaudily marked with red, black and white above….much red on wing.”

So, what was a Wallcreeper doing in southern England? It’s anyone’s guess. Obviously far from its normal range of southern Europe and central Asia, somehow it had lost its way like the scant dozen previously reported sightings in the UK over the past two decades.

My uncle has been a knowledgeable and competent bird-watcher for decades longer than I. He is not part of the rat-race of birders who share and celebrate their sightings publicly, he usually keeps his bird pleasures to himself but in his daily phone chat with his eldest daughter, my cousin, it came out. She mentioned his triumph to me, “Dad told me he saw a bird yesterday that he’d never seen before in his life. A Wallcreeper. He said he watched it for a long time, he’s very excited about it.” And so he should be. I am too, for him and his Bird of the Day.