lets get started, White-winged Crossbill behavior

[Allen T. Chartier]

Brian,

The 40-100 crossbills that have been somewhat regular at an area of Waterloo SRA in Washtenaw Co. have been feeding mostly on White Pine cones. The consistent 7-20 birds at the Tyler Street Cemetery in Wayne Co. have mainly been in spruces, but there is a pine in there that they've used too. A flock of 50-100 in the Brighton SRA, Livingston Co., has been feeding on Tamarack cones. So, they seem to have a more varied diet during these mega-irruptions, perhaps they are forced to.

Allen T. Chartier
amazilia1 at comcast.net
Inkster, Michigan, USA
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Website: www.amazilia.net
HummerNet: www.amazilia.net/MIHummerNet
Blog: http://mihummingbirdguy.blogspot.com
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Every day, the hummingbird eats its own weight in food.
You may wonder how it weighs the food. 
It doesn't. It just eats another hummingbird. 
-- Steven Wright
=========================================

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Brian Allen 
  To: Mich Chat 
  Sent: Saturday, January 31, 2009 4:13 PM
  Subject: lets get started, White-winged Crossbill behavior


  With all the White-winged Crossbill sightings lately I've noticed a couple of behaviors new to me.  First is WWCB feeding actively in the tops of White Pine trees in Cheboygan Co. I have never seen this before and had assumed WWCB were hemlock,spruce and cedar small cone specialists.

  Also this morning while CC sking on a two track through a hemlock forest I came upon a flock of 42 WWCB feeding in a small hemlock then crossing next to me to a cut clay bank.  Here the crossbills seemed to be gathering grit or clay with some gleening it from exposed roots somwhat like a boreal version of an Amazonian colpa attended by parrots but here by crossbills (it's been a bit too cold lately for parrots).

  BA


------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  Mich-chat mailing list
  Mich-chat at envirolink.org
  You can unsubscribe or change your options at:
  http://lists.envirolink.org/mailman/listinfo/mich-chat
  this message was delivered to:
  amazilia1 at comcast.net
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.envirolink.org/pipermail/mich-chat/attachments/20090131/d3554dd0/attachment.html