THE PARROT CROSSBILL. 
641 
tongue, passing it into the beak, where it is divested of its 
shell and the scale attached, and the kernel is swallowed. 
The bird’s strength is such that it can at one time raise 
all those scales which lie above the one under which it 
has inserted its beak. The action of forcing open the 
scales is always performed by the upper mandible, the 
lower one being supported against the pine-cone; thus it 
happens that the right or left side is turned upwards, 
according as the bird may be right-beaked or left-beaked, 
so to speak, or, in other words, according to the position 
of the bird’s mandibles. The crossed bill could not be 
dispensed with in this operation; it is only necessary for 
the bird to open its beak slightly so as to give it extra¬ 
ordinary breadth, and then but a slight lateral movement 
of the head is sufficient to wrench off the scale. The 
great development of the masticatory muscles gives the 
necessary power to the beak. 
As soon as the bird has finished one cone it imme¬ 
diately gets another: it generally takes from two to 
three minutes to finish one, and not unfrequently 
drops it before it has devoured a third of its contents, 
especially if disturbed. The bird will often fly as far as 
twenty paces, with this disproportionately heavy burden, 
to a tree the branches of which are large enough to 
furnish a satifactory work-bench. The presence of these 
birds in a tree is discovered by the falling cones, and the 
crackling noise they make while stripping them, let the 
birds themselves be ever so silent. When they have 
stripped the tree of the cones, they descend to the ground 
to operate on those that have fallen below; with this 
exception, and for the purpose of drinking, they never at 
any other time alight on the ground, and one may easily 
see by their clumsy gait that they are not at home on 
