Each spring and fall, as we switch from standard time to daylight saving time and back, there are always a few editorials complaining about the custom and identifying some possible health impacts it might cause. Few such articles praise the switch, but here is an exception: Daylight saving time is great!
Birds, of course, pay close attention to daylight but zero attention to actual time, which is a human invention. And the one activity that I write about is bird watching.
Just last week, I heard the initial stirrings of the dawn chorus of birdsong beginning at about 6 a.m. Only a few birds are singing at dawn now, including song sparrows, robins, chickadees and flickers. This week, at least before the steady rains developed, I was hearing the same chorus at 7 a.m., a much more reasonable hour as far as I am concerned.
I’ve written in previous columns about the dawn chorus. It’s one of the more remarkable avian phenomena. By mid-June, instead of a few singers there will be many, many more. Depending on location, there could be 30 or more bird species singing in that hour or two around dawn.
Which brings me to why I’m so invested in daylight saving time. By mid-June (the summer solstice), our dawn is at about 4:30 a.m., with the first light of predawn even earlier. I strongly advocate that at least once, everyone ought to experience a full dawn chorus. Without daylight saving time, I suspect my advocacy would fall on deaf ears — getting up a 3:30 a.m. is too darn early, even for the glory of a dawn chorus.
And, of course, I also appreciate having long hours of daylight available in the evening, for bird watching, leisurely dinner picnics and other after-work activities. To me it seems a poor trade to exchange one of those long summer evening hours for a daylight hour that falls between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. The birds don’t care , but bird watchers do.
The other day my Merlin app, which identifies bird song, informed me that red crossbills were in the area. I’ve been hearing them periodically this winter and so have some of you. I received two messages in the last month describing birds that looked like they had crossed bills and asking, “Is it possible that we have red crossbills locally?”
Yes, some winters crossbills are common here. Crossbills are seed-eating finches that are usually seen and heard at the top of large conifers — pine, hemlock, Douglas fir and spruce — or vocally as they fly from tree to tree. Their food is almost exclusively the small seeds that are encased in the conifer cones which they efficiently extract with their crisscrossed bills.
The typical breeding habitat exploited by crossbills is dense, mid-elevation conifer forests. When conifer seed production is prolific, the crossbills remain in these breeding territories almost year-around.
But when seed production fails, flocks of them will migrate in search of an abundant cone crop, and some years these flocks visit Thurston County. Flocks are usually small but sometimes can be very large ones. Years ago, I observed a red crossbill flock of some 400 birds on the Washington coast at Westport.
Crossbills are medium-sized birds, larger than a sparrow and smaller than a red-winged blackbird. Males are reddish overall with brownish wings; females and younger males are olive or yellowish with brown wings. But their certain identification feature is their crisscrossed bills. Worldwide there are only six species of birds with crossed bills, and we have two of them here in the Pacific Northwest, the red crossbill and the white-winged crossbill.
The white-winged crossbill is similar to the red, but the male is rosy in color and both sexes have two prominent white wing bars. They typically are limited to higher elevation spruce forests and, to my knowledge, have not been documented in Thurston County. This short video of these crossbills demonstrates how they use their bills to extract seeds from cones.
How Nature Works: White-winged Crossbill Feeding Technique
Red crossbills are in Thurston County now but leave in the spring. Check out their vocalization on the Merlin app and be alert to their calls as they fly overhead. Occasionally these birds will visit a feeder that has sunflower seeds, so keep an eye out for a finch-like bird with a strange-looking bill. You might get a close-up view of this remarkable winter visitor.
George Walter is environmental program manager at the Nisqually Indian Tribe’s natural resources department; he also has a 45+ year interest in bird watching. He may be reached at george@theJOLTnews.com
Photos for this column are provided by Liam Hutcheson, a 17-year-old Olympia area birder and avid photographer.
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Chappellg
What an interesting bird and marvelous adaptation. The video finally clued me in to how the bill works! Thanks
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