A Summer with the Birds. The Art of Camouflage with the Garden Creeper

Imagine you are a treecreeper. Your name has the verb “to climb”, so you climb a lot. All day long, all your life, and always in the same direction. You don’t climb building facades or mountain walls: that’s the job of Spider-Man and the wallcreeper, a real mountain bird! You are a small bird of the plains. Your mission: to climb tree trunks in woods, gardens or urban parks. To help you accomplish this, evolution by natural selection has given you powerful feline claws that allow you to grip the bark and advance towards the top of the pine or oak, in small successive jumps, a bit like a mouse, but vertically.

And, since nature is completely crazy, there is an additional ingredient to your madness: you climb each trunk by describing a spiral (or snail) around the tree, up to its top. Once at the top, you throw yourself into the air. You do not fly straight: you zigzag. Drunk driving? But no! You make your trajectory unpredictable, a trick to escape the sparrowhawk, a great predator of small birds. A bit like a bar of soap slipping from your hands, you are impossible to catch. Your destination: the base of the trunk of the tree next door.

An elegantly curved beak

Once you’ve landed, you immediately start climbing again, describing your spiral, all the way to the top, and so on, until you’ve covered the entire forest, in all its nooks and crannies, and all its secrets. You have an elegantly curved beak to dig into the narrowest furrows of the bark and extract the insects and larvae that you feast on. But, since you always have your nose buried in your things, you’re also a little vulnerable, and you never see the danger coming from behind you. Fortunately, nature has embroidered a trademark camouflage for you: a set of feathers dotted with white and beige, nicely streaked with red. They are the color of trees, and blend you in with your everyday environment.

For me, a poet in my spare time, you are a flying piece of bark. A miracle of natural selection, a diamond of “reverse engineering”. A work of art, quite simply. Imagine, now, that you are an ornithologist! As with any passion, you think of nothing else: birds. You are a bit like those tree creepers who have only one idea in mind: climbing. From the outside, you seem a bit manic. Even a bit crazy, not to say completely sick. If anyone ever tells you this, rest assured, a passion for birds is also the best medicine in the world. It intoxicates, gives wings, and breathes mountains of creativity.