1916, Moffat. — The Crossbill and its Diet. 5 
on a spruce-cone or a spruce-cone on the ground that 
bore marks of having been opened by a Crossbill. 
This is not because we have any lack of spruce -cones 
with edible seed, for many are dropped on the ground by 
Squirrels, denuded of scales for the greater part — though 
never, I think, for quite the whole — of their length ; and 
I have several times watched Siskins at work in the upper 
branches of Spruce trees, picking out the winged seeds 
from under the scales of growing cones — when the light 
" wings," drifting earthwards, have given me the first 
clue to the birds' presence. The seed is evidently good 
enough eating to Squirrel and Siskin ; but the Crossbill, 
which has been alleged to make Spruce -seeds his staple 
diet, passes them by in this country with contempt, and 
seems to devote himself exclusively to our two other 
conifers, the Scotch Fir and Larch ^ . 
At one time I thought it possible that this neglect of 
the Spruce — his supposed staple — might be apparent, not 
real ; in other words, that the Crossbill might pursue a 
different method with the Spruce -cones, in consequence of 
their larger size, and might extract the seed — as a Siskin 
does — from the growing cone, instead of snipping the cone 
bodily off its branch, as he does those of Larch and Pine, 
and holding it in his claws while tearing out the seeds. 
In that case there would, of course, be no litter of spruce- 
cones on the ground to betray the fact of Crossbills having 
held banquet in the branches above ; and in the absence 
of such litter the feeding-place might long remain un- 
discovered. This year, however, there has been a pretty 
extensive felling of timber — including Spruce — at Bally- 
hyland ; and as flocks of Crossbills had been in the woods 
all the summer I made a special point of examining the 
cones on the felled trees to see whether any of these bore 
marks of having been probed by feeding Crossbills. The 
result was that I found in all cases the scales of the cones 
undisturbed and whole — showing none of the peculiar 
gashes with which the Crossbill invariably leaves his mark 
on the scales of a rifled larch -cone. The evidence was 
1 I need say nothing of the Silver Fir, whose cones, saturated as they 
are with turpentine, offer no attraction, so far as I can see, to any seed- 
eating creature. 
