502 U-S. NATIONAL MUSEUM BULLETEST 23 7 part i 



"Courtship-feeding was first observed on February 3 when a male 

 offered his female salted grit. I also noted it on February 22, and 

 this time the male tendered his mate an aspen bud. During early 

 March several pairs of crossbills were apparently establishing territory 

 in a certain place on the south shore of Pimisi Bay near the mouth 

 of the river and here I eventually found 4 nests. The birds were 

 seen flying around in the tops of the trees with much singing, calling 

 and chasing. It was here also, I first witnessed males in flight song. 

 Around the female, usually sitting nibbling cone seeds in the very 

 top of a tree, the male rose on vibrating wings in circle after circle, 

 his brick-red plumage sparkling in the sun, uttering, at first, loud 

 whistled notes which presently ran into an enraptured melody of 

 clarion-like song. The performance usually ended with the female's 

 sudden departure to another tree and the male in hot pursuit after 

 her." 



Nesting. — Probably the first authentic nest of the red crossbill to 

 be recorded in North America was found by Eugene P. Biclmell at 

 Kiverdale, New York City, late in April 1875, when he discovered a 

 female building a nest that contained three eggs. He (1880) describes 

 it as follows: 



The nest was placed in a tapering cedar of rather scanty foliage, about eighteen 

 feet from the ground, and was without any single main support, being built in a 

 mass of small tangled twigs, from which it was with difficulty detached. The 

 situation could scarcely have been more conspicuous, being close to the inter- 

 section of several roads (all of them more or less bordered with ornamental ever- 

 greens) , in plain sight of as many residences, and constantly exposed to the view 

 of passers-by. The materials of its composition were of rather a miscellaneous 

 character, becoming finer and more select from without inwards. An exterior 

 of bristling spruce twigs loosely arranged surrounded a mass of matted shreds of 

 cedar bark, which formed the principal body of the structure, a few strips of the 

 same appearing around the upper border, the whole succeeded on the inside by a 

 sort of felting of finer material, which received the scanty lining of black horse- 

 hair, fine rootlets, grass stems, pieces of string, and two or three feathers. This 

 shallow felting of the inner nest can apparently be removed intact from the body 

 of the structure, which, besides the above mentioned material, contained small 

 pieces of moss, leaves, grass, string, cottony substances, and the green foliage of 

 cedar. 



The nest measured internally two and one half inches in diameter by over one 

 and a quarter in depth; being in diameter externally about four inches, and rather 

 shallow in appearance. 



A few years later, A. H. Helme (1883) reported a nest that he 

 found near Millers Place, Long Island, on Apr. 10, 1883. It was "on 

 a horizontal branch of a pine, about thirty feet from the ground * * *." 

 This nest was composed of fine shreds of chestnut bark and moss, 

 contained a few pieces of caterpillar's silk, and was lined with moss, 

 two or three feathers of a great homed owl, and several of the cross- 



