The Crossbills 



syncopated — and we shall half shudder as the shouting mysteries in 

 feathers lose themselves in the no less mysterious depths of distant 

 conifers. How little of life may be snatched at in passing! We see; we 

 hear; we do not comprehend. It is gone. 



The Crossbill undoubtedly owes its peculiar mandibles to an age- 

 long hankering for pine-seeds (using that word in the generic sense), a 

 desire fully satisfied according to the fashion of that Providence which 

 works so variously through Nature, and whose method we are pleased to 

 call evolution. The bill of the bird was not meant for an organ of pre- 

 hension, and Buffon, the Deist, once won a cheap applause by railing at 

 the Almighty for a supposed oversight in this direction ; but as matter of 

 fact, its wonderful crossed mandibles enable the Crossbill to do what no 

 other bird can, viz., to pry and cut open the scales of a fir cone, in order to 

 extract the tiny seed with its tongue. 



These birds are not entirely confined to a vegetable diet, for I once 

 detected a group of them feeding industriously in a small elm tree which 

 was infested with little gray insects, plant-lice, or something of the sort. 

 The presence of these insects, in colonies, caused the edges of the leaves to 

 shrivel and curl tightly backward into a protective roll. Close attention 

 showed that the Crossbills were feeding exclusively upon these aphides. 

 They first slit open a leaf-roll with their scissor-bills, then extracted the 

 insects with their tongues, taking care, apparently, to secure most of the 

 members of each colony before passing to the next. 



Crossbills also feed to some extent upon the ground, where they pick 

 up fallen seeds and other tidbits. An observer in Washington first 

 called my attention to another purpose which the birds have in visiting 

 the ground. He had noticed how at certain places, and notably where 

 dish-water was habitually thrown, the Crossbills were wont to congregate, 

 and, turning the head sidewise, to thrust out the tongue along the bare 

 ground in a most puzzling manner. Suspecting at last the real state of 

 affairs, he sprinkled the ground with salt, and upon their return the 

 birds licked it up with great avidity. The birds do not appear to recog- 

 nize the salt at first sight, but soon learn to resort to established salt-licks 

 in open places. Others have reported similar habits in connection with 

 certain mineral springs, where sodium chloride is sure to be one of the 

 ingredients. When we recall that the normal food of the Crossbills is 

 pine-seeds, this craving for nature's solvent is readily understandable. 



The nesting of the Crossbill is known, but it is not well known, and 

 it never can be perfectly known, for the reason that each pair of birds, 

 or at least each community of birds, is a law to itself. There is, apparent- 

 ly, no published record of the nesting of this bird within the State of 

 California, and that in spite of the fact that it is numerically one of the 



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