Pat Bean's blog

 Brown Creeper, photo courtesy of Wikimedia

I never saw patience as a virtue, just an excuse for those too lazy to take action or those frozen into place because of fear of making a wrong decision. Right or wrong – and it was often the latter – I had to immediately plow the furrow.  Patience played no role in my life until the birds trapped me in their seductive net.

 I suddenly found myself sitting for hours in an effort to watch and identify a tiny bird that was building a nest in the corner of a shelter at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. It was a barn swallow.

 The 10-minute trip across the causeway to Antelope Island, where I often hiked, began taking four hours. Is that a lone Barrow’s goldeneye in the middle of that flock of common goldeneyes? Yes! It is a Barrow’s! It’s the only duck in the group with a white crescent on its face instead of a white circle.

 Is that bird sitting on that tree limb at Beus Pond a loggerhead shrike or a northern shrike? Dang it! The bird flew away before I answered that question. But I did finally see a brown creeper that had eluded me for five years.

Dainty and delicately patterned to match the bark of a tree, the bird was clinging to the trunk of an oak about 30 feet away from me, and just two blocks from my daughter’s home in a populated subdivision in Dallas. I never would have seen it if I hadn’t been standing motionless for the past 15 minutes in the shade of a larger sprawling oak watching the antics of several butter butts.

 These birds are more properly known as yellow-rumped warblers, but one flash of their yellow butts and the nickname sticks in your mind. While the butter butts are hard to miss, the creeper is so well camouflaged that even once I knew it was there, my eyes sometimes fooled into thinking it was part of the tree. From my hidden vantage, I watched as the creeper spiraled upwards around the trunk, using its thin, down curved bill to search the bark for insects.

 OK. Uncle! Patience is a virtue – but you still have to get up off that couch and turn off the television to make it one.