April, 1916. The Irish Naturalist, 53 
THE CROSSBILL AND ITS DIET. 
BY W. F. DE V. KANE, M.A., M.R.I. A, 
In reading Mr. Moffat's article [supra, pp. 1-6), on the 
favourite diet of Loxia ciirvirostris in Ireland, it struck me 
that the following extract from probably the earliest record 
of the presence of this bird in this island might be of interest. 
The letter from which I quote is dated January 28, 1707, 
and was written by Mr. Samuel Waring of Waringstown, 
near Lurgan, Co. Down, to Dr. Thomas Molyneux, f.r.s., 
and is contained in a fasciculus of MSS. on natural history 
collected by the latter, now preserved in the Library of 
Trinity College, Dublin. The writer commences : "I 
herewith send you an account of a sort of birds seen in this 
neighbourhood these three months past, never known to 
be in these parts before." He describes them as being of 
the size of a Blackbird, with their heads and bodies of a 
bright flame colour, and their wings and tails duskish green. 
The females are all grey. Their bills are like those of 
parrots, and like them they eat out of their claw. They 
keep altogether in Firr trees, whose seed is their only meat, 
for with their bills they break off the cones off the firr trees, 
and holding it in their claw, they nibble and force open 
the leaves or folds thereof, and so pick out the seeds. The 
points of the bill lye over or sidewise of one another, and 
have points like a pair of scissors. 'Tis thought they 
came from Norway and Denmark with the fieldfares." 
The question arises of course whether the " firr trees " 
of the writer could have been any other conifer than Pinus 
sylvestris ? Professor Henry in a very learned and valuable 
study of the " Woods and Trees of Irelaaid " i shov/s that 
Pinus sylvestris once flourished as a native tree throughout 
most of the island, and lingered on in the North of Ireland 
round L. Erne till about 1800, and flourished in 1566 on 
the mountains of Co. Down, and mentions that the Caper- 
cailzie "with the gradual extinction of the pine became 
scarcer and scarcer and appears to have died out about 
the year 1760." The Spruce and Larch were not indigenous 
1 Louth Archaelogical Journal, 1914. 
A 
