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Red Crossbill

Status Irregular, uncommon resident. Breeds. For an unknown number of years prior to 1920, the Red Crossbill was seasonably regular in the Annapolis Valley and presumably over the province generally, particularly during late May and early June, apparently attracted by the elm seeds which ripen at that time.

About 1921 it practically disappeared, and from then until the early 1960s it was a rare bird throughout Nova Scotia. From 1962 on, numbers increased, with 12 seen that year in mid-May at Liverpool, and similar flocks seen on 19 April 1963 at Lower Ohio, Shelburne County, and on 3 June 1963 at Bridgewater. A peak number of more than 100 Red Crossbills was recorded on 26 November 1967 at Conrad Beach, Halifax County, by Charles R.K. Allen. By 1972 the Red Crossbill was common in small flocks provincewide and, during Christmas Bird Counts that year, 138 were counted at Broad Cove, Lunenburg County, 36 in Cape Breton Highlands National Park and 48 in the Dartmouth area. Another 100 of these birds were noted on 2 September 1975 at Belleville, Yarmouth County. Since that time numbers have again declined, with small numbers seen through all seasons in widely scattered areas, 1-10 birds per sighting.

Description Length: 13.5-16.5 cm. All plumages: Mandibles crossed at tips. Adult male: Body dark red, brighter on rump; wings and tail dark brown; tail well forked. Adult female: Crown and rump yellowish orange; wings and tail grayish brown; rest of body olive-green.

Breeding Nest: Because its nesting season extends from midwinter to midsummer, two types of nests are necessarily constructed, those for winter use being more substantially built to withstand the cold than summer nests. Winter nests are composed of twigs, weed stems, decayed wood fibre (worked into the exterior) and beard lichen. Summer nests are made of soft vegetable matter and lined with the silken down or tassels of fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium) seedpods; sometimes feathers are added, probably as often as procurable at that time of year. A nest I examined in August was fragile, without dead wood fibre and much less compact.

Nests are placed in a variety of sites, the most usual spot being in a large spruce, near the end of a long bushy limb, saddled among a cluster of twigs that help conceal it from below while overhanging branches protect it from above. Sometimes nests are hidden among the thick growths of beard lichen found on dead trees. A few nests have been found in the thick tops of small or medium-sized firs growing in dense, coniferous woods; others have been found in hemlocks, well hidden among clusters of small twigs or sprouts that grow where the branch leaves the trunk. The woodland chosen by the birds may be wholly coniferous or of both hard and soft growth; it may be in dry upland or low, boggy land, the prime requisite being an ample supply of seed-bearing cones. Nests have been found at heights of 3-10 m or more.

Eggs: 3-4; pale blue-green with spots of various shades of brown and lavender, chiefly around the larger end. Nesting begins early in January and may continue through July or later. My first nest was found on 4 August 1896. It was about 6 m up, saddled far out on the limb of a large spruce growing in an ornamental grove in Wolfville. The bird was brooding four half-fledged young. Three nests were found on 31 January 1906 by Harold F. Tufts (1906). Two contained newly hatched young and the third held three partially incubated eggs. On 25 February of that year I found two nests with fresh eggs; the first held four eggs, the other, three. Two nests were found in March 1906, one on the 13th and the other on the 31st; they contained three and four fresh eggs, respectively. All these 1906 nests were found in Kings County, in wooded areas adjacent to farmlands.

Complete sets of three and four eggs were about evenly divided. In each instance the females did all the incubating. The males were observed a number of times at very close range when feeding their mates by regurgitation. On one occasion, at temperatures below -20°C, I watched this feeding operation at a distance of about 1 m. The food substance passing from his throat to hers looked like a stream of thick cream, but it was actually a mass of small whitish seeds from the spruce and hemlock cones on which he had been feeding. Nests were located by watching males carrying food to sitting females or by watching females carrying nesting material.

One partly finished nest was visited later and found to contain four fresh eggs, all of which had cracked as a result of having been frozen, and no birds were in evidence. One 8 ha block of open, second-growth coniferous woods contained one dozen or more pairs of nesting Red Crossbills from January to March 1906, and perhaps half as many nesting White-winged Crossbills. The birds continued to nest there late in the winters of 1902, 1906 and 1913, but I have no record of more recent nestings.

Range Breeds in both the New and Old Worlds; in North America from southern Alaska, Manitoba, central Ontario, and Newfoundland, south to the northern United States and, in the western mountains, to Mexico and Guatemala.

Remarks The two species of crossbills are easy to distinguish. The Red Crossbill displays plain dark wings, but the wings of the White-winged Crossbill, as its name suggests, are conspicuously marked with double bars of white.

On 1 June 1969, Cyril Coldwell collected two birds from a mixed flock of crossbills, at Gaspereau, Kings County, to determine their subspecific status. The specimens were sent to the National Museum of Canada in Ottawa where W. Earl Godfrey identified them as Loxia curvirostra minor, the race found breeding here. Loxia curvirostra pusilla has been recorded here only once. Several specimens collected in late February 1932 near Wolfville by W. Earl Godfrey and Roland W. Smith were later examined by Harry C. Oberholser, who identified them as belonging to L. c. pusilla, the breeding subspecies of Newfoundland.