SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE HABITS OF CROSSBILLS 



(LOXJA C. MINOR) OBSERVED AT HANOVER, N. J., 



MAY 4-6, 1900. 



WILLIAM B. EVANS. 



These birds we saw every day, but doubt whether there were more 

 than a single pair. They evidently had no home cares, and wandered 

 about over several acres of pitch pines, but rarely so tar from a given 

 locality that fifteen minutes of careful looking and listening would not 

 reveal their whereabouts. One was in the red plumage (very bright on 

 the rump) the other, olive. 



On one afternoon I watched them carefully for three-fourths of an 

 hour, as they fed in a pitch pine, the top of which was about 25 feet high. 



They showed their tameness by descending lower and lower, until 

 they were only about eight feet from my head, so that the field-glass 

 v/as scarcely needed. In moving from cone to cone they progressed, 

 a step at a time, along the connecting branch, and once when climbing 

 from a lower to a higher twig the female (as I took the olive one to be) 

 used her beak much as a parrot on his cage bars. They seemed to 

 prefer to feed clinging to the cones with their heads downward, looking 

 below with a knowing eye, each time they paused to nip the kernel of 

 the seed they had withdrawn. 



When the beak was pressed in between the scales, one could plainly 

 see the imbricated rows separate and open, and the orange-colored 

 tongue dart out, and all at once, as if by magic the seed was in the 

 withdrawn beak, and the rejected wings were fluttering down. The 

 Crossbill thoroughly understands the combination of the pine cone. 



The mandibles of theiie two birds both crossed the same way, the 

 upper one turning to the left, and the lower one to the right. The 

 female bird more than once alighted on one of the short broken-off 

 dead branches which project from the main stem of the pitch pine 

 and worked away at the fractured end, darting out her tongue as she 

 crushed off fragments, sometimes holding small pieces of wood in her 

 beak a moment. But why she thus made kindling, 1 do not know. She 

 also sometimes settled among the long pine leaves at the very end of 

 a branch and nibbled away at the needles, and an examination of one 

 such place showed that the inner fleshy part of the leaf had been 

 eaten out, leaving the outer membrane only. 



Suddenly, at a well understood signal call, the two would launch out 

 into the air and undulate off to some distant tree. 



(7) 



