THE CROSSBILLS 
By MABEL OSGOOD WRIGHT 
The National Association of Audubon Societies 
Educational Leaflet No. 35 
Winter 
Visitors 
While we may count upon seeing 
certain species of birds during the 
migrations, and feel assured that the 
old favorites known since childhood 
will nest in the neighborhood every 
spring, the comings and goings of 
winter visitors are surrounded by a 
tantalizing uncertainty. 
In the small company of these hardy 
voyagers of the air, we may, in the 
.eastern and Middle States, include the familiar Junco, the Tree and the 
White-throated Sparrows, the Winter Wren, Brown 
Creeper, Golden-crowned Kinglet, Northern Shrike, 
and Redpoll ; and also occasionally the Snowy Owl, 
Snowflake, and Longspur, and the wholly irresponsible Crossbills ; but 
the presence of the last-named depends on the presence of cone-bearing 
trees. 
“These birds,” as Dr. Elliott Coues remarks, “are much attached to 
pine-woods, the seeds of the conifers furnishing them abundant food, of 
a kind that their curiously shaped bills enable them to secure with great 
ease and address. From their summer resorts in the depth of evergreen 
woods the Crossbills come, flocking in the fall, to all other parts of New 
England and beyond, generally associated with Pine Grosbeaks and 
Redpolls, always gentle, unsuspicious, and apparently quite at their ease.” 
When, on a cold winter morning, soon after a snowfall, I hear a 
clear metallic call-note far up among the spruces, I know that the Cross- 
bills have come. When I go out under the same trees to prove the 
sound by a glimpse of the birds themselves, the calling stops, and instead, 
as I pause to listen and focus my glass on a particular 
bird of bright hue, a rustling noise, akin to the falling 
of dry and somewhat heavy leaves, mingles with a few 
colloquial twitterings, as if the birds were talking to themselves, parrot- 
fashion. 
The rustling is caused by the shelling of the cone-scales as the Cross- 
bills pick out the seeds that lie between them. Sometimes a person 
sitting quietly under a tree will be astonished at a steady shower of these 
scales, not suspecting, until he rises and frightens them away, that a 
137 
Rustling 
the Cones 
