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Updated: July 27, 2025
This gives the seed eating birds, the siskins, the pine grosbeaks and especially the crossbills their best opportunity and they eagerly pluck out such seeds as the narrow openings will give them a chance at. Between these and the squirrels the pine forests of the future are decimated before their seeds have been planted.
They're cutting down the wood, I hear, To make it into war material, And, where the crossbills came, this year Their firs are lying most funereal; There's steam saw-mills humming And engines at haul, A new Winter coming And more trees to fall.
The birds, though none too near, had given me an excellent observation, and as long as they were in sight I had felt no uncertainty whatever as to their identity. The bill alone, of which I had taken particular note, ought in all reason to be held conclusive. So much for one side of the case. On the other hand, however, the second trio were unmistakably crossbills.
The Crossbills build in evergreens, and all around their nests hang the cones with spicy seeds stored away under the scales, ready for the birds to eat. So they do not have to go far from home for their marketing." "But their beaks are so crooked that I don't see how they can pick out the cone seeds," said Nat.
The wood thrush and the hermit stand at the head as songsters, no two persons, perhaps, agreeing as to which is the superior. Under the general head of finches, Audubon describes over sixty different birds, ranging from the sparrows to the grosbeaks, and including the buntings, the linnets, the snowbirds, the crossbills, and the redbirds.
MacCulloch mentions its feeding on the apple-pips, and doing damage in the orchards accordingly, and I know it is generally supposed to do so, and has in some places got the name of "Shell Apple" in consequence, but though I have several times kept Crossbills tame, and frequently tried to indulge them with apples and pips, I have never found them care much about them; and a note of Professor Newton's, in his edition of 'Yarrell, seems to agree with this.
They found abundance of pine-cones strewn on the ground, but, alas for our little squirrels! very few kernels in them; for the crossbills and chiccadees had been at work for many weeks on the trees; and also many families of their poor relations, the chitmunks or ground squirrels, had not been idle, as our little voyagers could easily guess by the chips and empty cones round their holes.
"Some frosty morning in October, if you hear a sound coming from the sky, like the tinkling of little bells 'Tlink-link-link-link' you may be sure there is a flock of Crossbills near, and soon you will see them climbing about an evergreen, or quietly picking seeds on a birch or beech.
The deer had gone down to the lower ground at the first sign of coming winter, and the coyotes and the wolves had followed to spend the cold months in the foot-hills and on the plains about the haunts of man. The woodchucks were already asleep below-ground, and of the birds only the woodpeckers and the crossbills, and some smaller birds fluttering among the pine-branches, remained.
"There is a flock of our relatives not far away. We came down with the Crossbills. All together we made quite a party." Peter and Jumper stayed a while to gossip with the Grosbeaks. Then Peter bethought him that it was high time for him to return to the dear Old Briar-patch, and bidding his new friends good-by, he started off through the Green Forest, lipperty-lipperty-lip.
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