6:68 a.m. 35 degrees, wind S 7 mph. Sky: a painterly amalgam of blues, silver, grays, and a burst of rose in the east, blooms and fades quickly like a desert wildflower. Permanent streams: Sprawls in the flats. Churns and roars in the narrows. Any notion that we're still in the throes of a drought (at least in Coyote Hollow) dissipates. Wetlands: dull beneath a painterly sky, ruffled clouds—blue, gray, and white; remnants of rose. Nearby, in the pines, a jazzed red squirrel unleashes non-stop chatter. Stands on hind legs, propped by its tail, throws head back, and hollers, little wolf on a limb. Pond: otter trail from marsh up the berm obvious, the otter itself is not. The narrow path must be fresh, dogs, noses to the ground, devoted.
AOR: a pair of red squirrels run halfway across the road. See me—retreat. Chatter. Cluck. Squeak.
A flock of thirty (or so) red crossbills overhead, above the pond. For a moment, crossbills fill the airwaves. Flight calls, a rapid-fire kip, kip, kip, kip. Seemingly, all at once. Then, silence. Land in the crowns of adjacent pines. Itinerant seed-eaters hungrily attacking cones. Tamest of wild birds, I've watched them, just north of Boston, jets low overhead, extract seeds from the cones of pitch pine. On my knees, eye level. Five-feet away. Today, crossbills are a hundred feet up in the white pines, buffeted by a southern breeze. Big-headed. Short-tailed. Beaks like pliers or tweezers, twisted at the tips. Hard to tell . . . too high in the pines.
Each of the eleven red crossbill Types specializes in extracting the seeds of a different conifer. Seed predators, biologists, call them. A crossbill wedges its weird bill between the scales of a ripe (open) cone. Closes the crossed tips with powerful jaw muscles and twists, turns, pulls the seed loose from the cone scale. Then, husks the seed on the roof of its mouth. According to my friend Tom Sherry, a Tulane ornithologist, general seedeaters (pine siskins, for instance) held at bay by the tightness of cone scales cannot extract pine seeds.
Each of the eleven red crossbill Types evolved a twisted bill best suited to harvest and husk the seeds from a particular evergreen. Tree and bird conjoined. Think Darwin's finches, evolutionary radiation driven by food-competition over limited resources. In the case of crossbills . . . conifer seeds. A stunningly august work of natural selection forged over deep time. Like monarchs and milkweed . . . bill and cone together forever.
I remember reading THE BEAK OF THE FINCH by Jonathan Weiner years ago, when he won the 1995 Pulitzer for his account of Peter and Rosemary Grant as they studied the finches on Galapagos.
https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/jonathan-weiner
The weave of nature's connections is a marvel, and I found this short film of the crossbill in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NvU8WG9bg0
I used to talk with students about the difference between "visceral" and "vicarious" experience, back when I was still camping and witnessing with my own eyes. Vicarious articles and films just aren't the same, so thanks again for sharing your visceral experiences.