Description
Similar in appearance, all treecreepers are small birds with streaked and spotted brown upperparts, rufous rumps and whitish underparts. They have long decurved bills, and long rigid tail feathers that provide support as they creep up tree trunks looking for insects.
The Eurasian Treecreeper is 12.5 cm (5 in) long and weighs 7.0–12.9 g (0.25–0.46 oz). It has warm brown upperparts intricately patterned with black, buff and white, and a plain brown tail. Its belly, flanks and vent area are tinged with buff. The sexes are similar, but the juvenile has duller upperparts than the adult, and its underparts are dull white with dark fine spotting on the flanks.
The contact call is a very quiet, thin and high-pitched sit, but the most distinctive call is a penetrating tsree, with a vibrato quality, sometimes repeated as a series of notes. The male's song begins with srrih, srrih followed in turn by a few twittering notes, a longer descending ripple, and a whistle that falls and then rises.
The range of the Eurasian Treecreeper overlaps with that of several other treecreepers, which can present local identification problems. In Europe, the Eurasian Treecreeper shares much of its range with the Short-toed Treecreeper. Compared to that species, it is whiter below, warmer and more spotted above, and has a whiter supercilium and slightly shorter bill. Visual identification, even in the hand, may be impossible for poorly marked birds. A singing treecreeper is usually identifiable, since Short-toed Treecreeper has a distinctive series of evenly spaced notes sounding quite different from the song of Eurasian Treecreeper; however, both species have been known to sing the other's song.
Three Himalayan subspecies of Eurasian Treecreeper are now sometimes given full species status as Hodgson's Treecreeper, for example by BirdLife International, but if they are retained as subspecies of Eurasian, they have to be distinguished from three other South Asian treecreepers. The plain tail of Eurasian Treecreeper differentiates it from Bar-tailed Treecreeper, which has a distinctive barred tail pattern, and its white throat is an obvious difference from Brown-throated Treecreeper. Rusty-flanked Treecreeper is more difficult to separate from Eurasian, but has more contrasting cinnamon, rather than buff, flanks.
The North American Brown Creeper has never been recorded in Europe, but an autumn vagrant would be difficult to identify, since it would not be singing, and the American species' call is much like that of Eurasian Treecreeper. In appearance, Brown Creeper is more like Short-toed than Eurasian, but a vagrant might still not be possible to identify with certainty given the similarities between the three species.
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