A long walk, but sadly, no creepers

So I did the Christmas bird count Sunday in Glacier National Park, where I walked about 12 miles to see a chickadee. I at least could have seen a creeper. Creepers are pretty common in the woods I walked through, but no, no creepers.

Just the above-mentioned chickadee and a lone woodpecker.

Six of it in mud, the rest in icy snow. It was not fun.

A creeper, by the way, is not your neighbor who is always standing in the window with the drapes barely pulled back so you can see his one good eye — it’s a little brown bird with a curved bill especially designed for probing under bark for insects.

It also has a sweet little song and most of the time you’ll hear them before you see them, but I didn’t even hear any this year as I slogged through miles of mud and ice and snow.

(I suppose your neighbor is a creeper, too, but hey, that’s your problem.)

I’ve volunteered for this route for years and quite honestly, I don’t know why. The woods are big and always damp and if you’re just looking at it, you’d think it would be rife with birds. But in the winter, it’s pretty darn quiet, always has been.

So it was a long walk, and I made it to Avalanche Creek in a little over three hours and made it back in three and a half. Not sure why I was slower on the way back, since I saw almost nothing other than a bearded guy in Gore-Tex ski pants who was apparently headed even farther, which is to say he was going to Avalanche Lake, which is a pretty good haul from Lake McDonald Lodge.

When you do these surveys, you don’t write down the actual name of the bird, you write down an acronym, what birders call an alpha code.

A common raven, for example, is a CORA, while a black-capped chickadee is a BCCH. It’s not as simple as it sounds, however. For example, I also saw a three toed woodpecker, so I wrote down TTWP, but it turns out it’s an American Three Toed Woodpecker, so it should have been ATTW.

Oh well. When I was done, I went back to the office in Glacier and compared notes with the other birders who had been out on their routes. There was a discussion on whether a duck someone saw was a scaup, which would be rare, and another discussion about what kind of loons were spotted way the heck out there on Lake McDonald.

I suggested it might be grebe based on some red I saw in the super grainy Loch Ness Monster-like photo, but everyone else insisted they were loons because the photo didn’t really lend any scale and the good folks that saw it said the birds were just way too big to be grebes.

(Grebes are quite a bit smaller than loons.)

This is how us bird nerds talk. Grebes, loons, creepers, alpha codes.

Happy New Year.

Chris Peterson is editor of The Hungry Horse News.