The River Elm is a bridge to the balcony, but some, like this Brown Creeper, choose not to cross it. They find all they need without visiting my feeders.

Until April of 2004, I had never heard a Brown Creeper sing. When I did, on a solitary mountain trail in Maine, I did not believe at first such beautiful sound was coming from this drab little bird.

A year and a half later, I read this in Edwin Way Teale's Circle of the Seasons: "...William Brewster, the famous Cambridge ornitholigist, describes this performance amid the norther firs and spruces as an exquisitely pure and tender song of four notes, the last abruptly falling, 'but dying away in an indescribeably plaintive cadence, like the soft sigh of the wind among the pine boughs.'"

Although I must have read that passage once before, when I was eight or so years old, only now did I fully understand it.