Vol. XXIV 

 1907 



Peabody, Crossbills of Northeastern Wyoming. 273 



Crossbills were, in the following days, fairly abundant and easy 

 to observe. Yet go where I would, search where I might, over the 

 hills and through the canons of the vicinage of Newcastle, Weston 

 County, no trace could I find of anything like domestic occupations 

 among the busy crossbills. But on the morning of February 12, 

 but forty feet or so from the small pines whereon I saw the feeding 

 operations of February 2, I found, to my incredulous astonishment, 

 a female crossbill feeding three young in a bull-pine sapling not ten 

 feet high, on the very corner of my church lot. 



"A male feeding his mate, indeed," grumbled I to myself, as to 

 the feeding incident of February 2 in the very heart of town. The 

 birds were not four feet from my head, and 1 had every opportunity 

 of watching them critically for four or five minutes. The three 

 fledglings were very hungry (young crossbills are always hungry), 

 and sat on the pine boughs, about their mother, waiting for the 

 filling and the subsequent un-filling of her throat with the bull-pine 

 seeds. One youngster, after being partially filled up, as to his crop, 

 removed a foot or so from the rest of the family and began intently 

 to pry at the bark of the limb on which he sat. (This operation I 

 have seen enacted several times since; and I am quite convinced 

 that it has much to do with the nascent crossing of the mandibles. 1 ) 

 Eager to secure at least a single example of these young (still be- 

 lieving the rearing of these birds, at so early a date, to be unusual), 

 I searched for them a half-hour later, they having in the meanwhile 

 impulsively flown from the sapling of their morning luncheon to 

 some spot unknown. Fortunately, they were found on the same 

 lot and but fifty feet from the spot where they had just been seen, 

 perched, quite as before, on another pine sapling. With a mop- 

 stick as my weapon, I tried to secure one of the young crossbills. 

 It sat a few inches from its mother, awaiting her good offices. At 

 the stroke of my weapon the fledgling flew — though he was the 



1 There seems to be no apparent law regarding the direction in which the lower 

 mandible crosses the upper. Of fifteen specimens respecting which record has been 

 made, ten were males and five were females. Four of the females had the lower 

 mandible crossing to the left; with one specimen having the mandible crossing to 

 the right. In six males the crossing was toward the right, and in four toward the 

 left. Thus eight specimens had the mandible crossing to the left, and seven to 

 the right. No regularity thus appears; and it is a fair question for speculation 

 whether or not the curvature is not produced, indifferently, by each juvenile, accord- 

 ing to its own impulses. 



