4 Bird - Lore 
“shapeless masses.” All the nests observed held fresh eggs between January 
22 and March 17. (An account of these nestings will be found in “The Auk,” 
1906, Pp. 339-) 
The writer spent many delightful hours, at all seasons of the year, making 
as intimate studies as possible of the ways of the Crossbill (Loxia curvirostra 
stricklandi) of Crook and Weston counties, Wyoming. Readers of Brrp-LoRE 
who may care to go over, from a comparatively technical point-of-view, a partial 
outlining of these studies will find them in ‘The Auk,’ for 1907, p. 271. A few 
of the broader outlines of my study may here be briefly given. 
I found the Wyoming race of Crossbills exceedingly erratic and irregular. 
In the matter of breeding, they appear—if that were possible—to be particularly 
erratic. To state the case in its probable extreme: I have studied fledgling Cross- 
bills, on the shale hills of Newcastle, Weston county, Wyoming, that were 
probably hatched from eggs laid in November; and I have seen them feeding 
callow young in July! 
In the very midst of the railway town of Newcastle, one still, extremely cold 
morning (February 2), with a thermometer-registration of minus thirteen, I stood, 
at eight o’clock, beneath a lone bull-pine sapling. Crossbills were cricketing 
their crispy chirps overhead. Being quite used to this, I paid little heed, but 
simply said: ‘Guess it must be nearly Crossbill nesting-time; that old male 
seems to be feeding his mate.”’ Ten days later, at the same hour, I stood at my 
street-corner near the same spot, beneath a very small bull-pine sapling. (It 
was but eight feet tall, at its very spire.) From amid its branches I heard a clam- 
orous, rather mellow, Pee-tiv, pee-tiv-tiv, iterated by several birds. Glancing 
up, I saw, to my dumb astonishment, a mother Crossbill alternately feeding three 
young that were quite as large as herself. Bits of down still adhering to the feath- 
ers of the backs of their crowns bespoke their juvenility, while the case 
of their beak-commissures was most decidedly “ diagnostic.” 
There the trio perched, but four feet above my head. The mother, with 
generic nonchalance, gave me no heed whatever.! The bull-pine seeds which the 
female Crossbill would alternately extract and dole out, by turns, to her progeny, 
were not pre-digested. Yet they were, quite as manifestly, macerated. (And later 
studies convinced me that this feature of feeding was uniform, at almost all 
stages of the growth of the young Crossbills.) 
During the weeks that followed, I repeatedly heard a note of mature Cross- 
bills, previously unheard. It was an apparently excited, “ Tvip-trip-trip,” 
sembling marvelously some intonations of that cheery, monotonal, “kip,” with 
which the Arctic Three-toed Woodpecker beguiles his wintry toils. The “trip” 
note of the Crossbills became inseparably (and seemingly with exclusiveness) con- 
nected with nuptial excitation; and with probable parental apprehension. In- 
deed, I long expected the hearing of this note to become, for me, the harbinger 
1Robie W. Tufts once wrote me of touching, and even actually stroking, the back of a female White- 
winged Crossbill, who was feeding her young. 
