Page:Ornithological biography, or an account of the habits of the birds of the United States of America, vol 2.djvu/595



This species I have found more abundant in Maine, and in the Bri- tish provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, than any where else. Although I have met with it as early as the month of August in the Great Pine Forest of Pennsylvania, I have never seen its nest. Many persons in the State of Maine assured me that they had found it on pine-trees in the middle of winter, and while the earth was deeply covered with snow. The people employed in cutting pine timber at that season, when it is easier to remove the logs to the rivers, in which they are subsequently floated when the ice melts, have very frequently told me, that on felhng a tree they have caught the young Crossbills, which had been jerked out of their nest. Several of my acquaintances in that district promised to send me nests, eggs, and young ; but as yet, I am sorry to say, none of them have reached me. While at Labrador I was much disappointed at not finding a single bird of this species, although the White-winged Crossbill was tolerably abundant there ; and in Newfoundland matters were precisely the same.

The Crossbill lives in flocks, composed apparently of several fami- lies, and is an extremely gentle and social bird. They are easily ap- proached, caught in traps, or even killed with a stick. So unsuspicious are they with respect to man, that they not unfrequently come up to the very door of the woodman's cabin, and pick the mud with which he has plastered the spaces between the logs of which it is composed. When the huts are raised on blocks, to prevent dampness, they are often seen under them, picking up the earth for want of better food, while the weather is at its coldest.

Their food consists principally of the seeds contained in the cones of different species of the pine and fir. In the pine forests of Pennsylvania I saw them feeding on those of the white pine, the hemlock, and the spruce, as well as on various kinds of fruits. Wherever an apple-tree bore fruit, the Crossbills were sure to be on it, cutting the apples to pieces in order to get at the seeds, in the manner of our Parakeet of the south.