White-winged Crossbill / Loxia leucoptera

It almost looks like this male White-winged Crossbill has a red feather sticking out from the top of its head, but it's just a bit of disgarded husk from one of the many seeds it had been eating from the cones. You can really see the crossed tips of its beak in this photo.

On 16 November 2015, it would have been my older daughter’s birthday. Feeling that I needed to get out for a while, I met up with a group of friends for a three-hour walk in Weaselhead. It had snowed a bit overnight and, though it was mostly sunny, the temperature was around 1°C. This meant winter jacket and winter boots complete with ice-grabbers as the paths were very icy and slippery. 27 species of bird were seen. Two or three people saw what they reckoned was an owl (Great Horned) in flight from the forest. A Snow-shoe Hare in its white, winter coat was just about visible, hiding in a tangle of bushes.

We had quite good views of several White-winged Crossbills. These are such colourful birds - at least the males are. The females are a greenish yellow, but still beautiful. Their bills are crossed, to enable them to get the seeds out of the cones. They tend to land high up in tall trees, hence a zoomed and cropped image.

“A medium-sized finch of the boreal forest, the White-winged Crossbill is adapted for extracting seeds from the cones of coniferous trees. It moves large distances between years tracking the cone crop from place to place.” From AllAboutBirds.

www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/white-winged_crossbill/id

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-barred_Crossbill

1.Canada Goose-200+
2.Swan sp.,-7
3.Mallard-4
4.Common Goldeneye-1 f.
5.Northern Goshawk-1
6.Rough-legged Hawk-1
7.Killdeer-1
8.Ring-billed Gull?-1
9.Great Horned Owl-1
10.Downy Woodpecker-4+
11.Hairy Woodpecker-1
12.Northern Flicker-2
13.Blue Jay-4+
14.Black-billed Magpie-20
15.Common Raven-2+
16.Black-capped Chickadee-50+
17.Boreal Chickadee-4
18.Red-breasted Chickadee-1
19.White-breasted Nuthatch-1
20.Bohemian Waxwing-100+
21.Dark-eyed Junco-1+
22.Pine Grosbeak-10+
23.House Finch-1
24.Red Crossbill-1 f.
25.White-winged Crossbill-75+
26.Common Redpoll-30+
27.House Sparrow-6