I 90 ] 
CROSS BILL. FEMALE. 
Is of a dusky green colour, more or less mixed with brown in those places 
where the male is red. Though it is an undoubted fact that these birds 
change their colours, or more properly the shades of their colours, alter- 
ing to different varieties of the same colour, yet both sexes still differ from 
each other, and are easily distinguished at different times of the year. 
This bird fixes on the dark dreary forests of pine and fir, as the place of 
its breeding ; and in the depth of winter their loves commence, as they 
build as early as the months of January and February, and their young 
are full grown in March, before other birds begin to lay eggs. 
They make their nests in the highest part of the fir tree, fastening it 
to the branch with the resinous matter which exudes from those trees, 
smearing them with that substance, so that the melted snow or rain cannot 
penetrate or injure their young ones. 
A pair of these birds were kept in this Menagery ; they were perfectly 
familiar, and had a very feeble note ; their food was hemp seed, and occa- 
sionally the cones of the pine. 
In the spring of 1 7 87 a great number of these birds, male and female, 
were discovered among the fir woods adjoining to the seat of John Eliott, 
Esq. at Binfield, near Windsor, Berks. Several of them were shot while 
in the act of feeding voraciously on the cones. They had never been ob- 
served at any former period near that spot, nor have they ever since 
returned. 
