Red crossbills cap off remarkable autumn
September brought the first hint that we might be in for some interesting times in the bird world, when the first Woodhouse’s scrub-jays appeared in the area, their distinctive, raucous calls announcing their arrival. These visitors from higher-elevation habitats, while not regular in the lowlands every year, aren’t considered especially rare, but occasionally they signal that conditions may usher in a number of other montane species that are.
Since their arrival, the scrub-jays have set up winter feeding territories across the area, busily putting up stores of nuts (often pecans) and seeds to sustain them through the cold months. In the meantime have come several reports of pinyon jays, a species in steep decline that hails from similar mountain habitats and is much less often encountered away from them. Whether as single birds heard vocalizing or small groups seen overhead in flocks, the encounters both delighted and concerned local birders, who wonder about the probably dire conditions that caused them to leave home base.
Usually in these years of mountain birds descending to lowland areas in the winter, known as irruptions, nuthatches are part of the lead vanguard. Although smatterings of red-breasted and a few pygmy nuthatches have been reported, there haven’t been especially large numbers this fall, but signs quickly pointed to it being an extraordinary year with the unprecedented influx of juniper titmice into the borderlands. These engaging little birds from the mid-elevations are extremely rare in the lowlands, with only a handful of previous records.
On their heels (tails?) came Townsend’s solitaires, co-inhabitants of the mountains, along with a few Williamson’s sapsuckers. The former are robin cousins that are often attracted to juniper fruits in October and November but only occasionally seen in winter, and the latter, a type of woodpecker of the high elevations, is also much rarer after the fall months.
Reports of a few Cassin’s finches and some red crossbills came next, but numbers of the latter have really exploded, with flocks traveling from one stand of ornamental pines to another. Their loud “kup kup kup” vocalizations make them easy to spot, and while their preferred food source on their home turf in the mountains is pine and spruce cones, here they are likely to be seen amongst mature Afghan pine plantings.
A close look at their unique bills reveals how they are able to manipulate pine cones in order to extract the meat of the seed. Sometimes when walking under a stand of tall pines where a group of birds is feeding, one can hear the clipping away of the cone fragments and see the frass falling to the ground. Biologists differentiate up to eight different types of red crossbills, but all males are varying shades of red and all females are yellowish-green.
In our neighborhood, we hear a flock of about a dozen birds daily as they move about, and are grateful that there are so many mature stands of pine trees that can support them. As with the pinyon jays, we imagine that conditions on their home front are probably pretty dire, so what might await them there is unknowable.
Just in the past few weeks, another quite rare lowland visitor has put in appearances across the borderlands, the evening grosbeak. These large, chunky finch cousins also tend to travel in groups, and are delighting birdwatchers in a number of locations. We had one flashy male pay our backyard a brief visit, perhaps scouting the place, but it didn’t remain long. Friends in El Paso report that some have been snacking on Chinese pistache fruits. I fervently wish these all these likely fire-and-drought survivors good luck and better conditions next year.
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Marcy Scott is a local birder, botanizer, and author of "Hummingbird Plants of the Southwest." Along with her husband, Jimmy Zabriskie, she operates Robledo Vista Nursery in the North Valley, www.robledovista.com, specializing in native and adapted plants for birds and wildlife habitat. She can be reached at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on Las Cruces Sun-News: Naturally Speaking: Red crossbills cap off remarkable autumn
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