A group of White-winged Crossbills has visited our backyard, observed on a few occasions over the last month. We live in St. Paul, Mac-Grovelamd neighborhood
First seen on Jan. 15-16, then again this past week, on Jan. 27. The earlier viewing I would say ~10 + birds, second viewing maybe a bit fewer, ~6. The first viewing I observed both males and females, the later viewing I only spotted females. We have a group of pine trees with many small cones, this is where the birds were foraging. Both I and my neighbor friend who also observed, submitted these to eBird on the earlier occasion, and just my neighbor submitted on this week’s sighting. None of these submissions showed up on eBird rare bird alerts. We are puzzled as to why, not sure what we are doing wrong. I see other local White-winged Crissbill sightings are making the list. I realize this is not an eBird forum but if anyone had any insight on this, we would be interested to know.. I will submit these sightings to the MOU database later today.. An interesting behavior observed is that they do not seem to take great care to grab hold of any given cone and really exhaust it’s contents before moving on—the cones really fall like rain when they are going at it! We have a carpet of cones on the ground. Brian T. St. Paul ---- Join or Leave mou-net: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=mou-net Archives: http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html During the pandemic, the MOU encourages you to stay safe, practice social distancing, and continue to bird responsibly.
