Red Crossbill

About the Red Crossbill

The Red Crossbill carries its field mark in its name: mandible tips that literally cross, a bill built like a specialized pry bar. The bird slips the crossed tips between the scales of a closed pine cone, twists, and lifts the seed out with its tongue - a lock-pick for a food source almost no other bird can touch.

Males are washed brick-red, females olive-gold, and both spend most of their lives clambering parrot-fashion through conifer tops, hanging upside down and chattering in flight with hard "jip-jip" calls - often the first clue a flock is overhead.

Because cone crops boom and bust, crossbills are nomads, wandering continent-wide in search of seed and breeding wherever and whenever the crop allows - even in midwinter. Texas sits at the edge of that wandering: some winters bring flocks to the pines of the Panhandle, West Texas mountains, and even city parks, while other years pass with none.

The species is really a complex of call types, each tuned to different conifers - a puzzle ornithologists are still working out - which makes every Texas encounter worth recording.