Tag Archives: Red Crossbill

Science at work: How many kinds of Red Crossbills are there, anyway?

Red Crossbills range all over North America’s western mountains and northern forests, filling the air with their brief, metallic chips and attacking pine, fir, and hemlock cones with their unique bills. But there’s a growing realization that this species consists of a whole group of distinct types—some of them possibly even full species. Plumages don’t [...]