WHITE-WINGED CROSSBILL 535 



cones is audible for a short distance, and they often bear mute testi- 

 mony to the scene of a recent feast as they lie thick under the trees. 

 A small amount of insect matter was found in some of the stomachs 

 collected in January." 



Mrs. Louise de Kiriline Lawrence ^\Tote Mr. Bent an interesting 

 account of her observations of a flock of 52 birds. She says, "They 

 were mostly engaged in feeding on the seeds of the tamaracks which 

 carry a very rich harvest of cones this year. But I also observed that 

 a great many of the spruces had their clusters of cones completely 

 stripped of seeds so that nothing remained but the stems still hanging 

 there. The stripped cones looked like thin silk bobbins without any 

 silk. Some birds were feeding on the highway which has been sanded 

 with chlorided gravel. The birds picked up the apparently salty 

 snow by sideways motions of their crossed bills and separated whatever 

 salty grains and gravel specks they relished from the snow in their 

 bUls, so that the snow appeared like froth around their mandibles." 



Mrs. Hildegarde C. Allen watched a female on a hard road in winter. 

 She wrote Mr. Bent that the bird "seemed to stay almost completely 

 in one place, and as the sun shone against her pincers, I could see her 

 pink tongue lick out and against the pebble asphalted in. She did 

 not in the least appear to be picking up grit dislodged by her bill, she 

 looked to be licking the black tarred pebble. Since our roads are well 

 salted all winter, then bare this 24th of March, I decided definitely 

 she was licking the salt from its surfacel" Gordon M. Meade 

 (1942), however, writes of an instance of the extremely heavy mortality 

 of this and other species observed feeding voraciously on a mixture 

 of sand and calcium chloride surfacing a road in March. Inferentially, 

 this diet may have been responsible for this slaughter since the birds 

 "appeared to be too sick to rise and even though motorists drove 

 slowly they were killed in great numbers." 



F. H. Allen wrote Mr. Bent the following: "In feeding on green 

 spruce cones the white-winged crossbill picks off a cone and holds 

 it down with one foot whUe it rapidly picks out the seeds, letting the 

 scales fall. When a cone is finished it is dropped to the ground. The 

 bird when thus feeding is perched on a small branch or twig. By 

 thus picking the cone off and holding it down the bird can more 

 easily get the seeds out of the unopened cone than if it were left 

 dangling in the air. In dealing with ripe cones, however, the cross- 

 bills can, and do, pick out the seeds without detaching the cones." 

 Allen did, on one occasion, see a bird "eating seeds from a green cone 

 without detaching it and without cutting off the scales, probably 

 because the seeds were soft and undeveloped." 



Maurice G. Brooks (1943) discusses the occurrence of the species 

 in the red spruce belt on the higher mountain peaks in West Virginia. 



