Contributor
Date
Location
- Age and sex
- Adult, Unknown sex - X
- Sounds
- Call; Flight call
- Playback
- Playback not used
Media notes
Mostly type 6 flight calls but there are also some toop calls.
Observation details
There was a flock of about 20 that flew in 13 minutes after I arrived, landed near the tops of Chihuahua pines, and started working on the cones to eat the seeds. I counted 11 crossbills in one tree while they were feeding, but when the flock flushed, I saw roughly double that number fly out of that tree and two adjacent trees, so 20 is probably a slight undercount. I followed the birds around after they flushed three times and recorded them over an interval of about 30 minutes. Seen in binoculars but not photographed. Roughly 2/3 of the birds were females. I searched for juveniles and immatures but didn't see any. I concentrated on obtaining audio recordings rather than watching the birds visually. Audio spectrograms show the classic U-shaped and V-shaped flight calls characteristic of type 6. One recording also includes some type 6 toop calls and another contains brief fragments of song. Flight call type verified by Tim Spahr. Twice the birds were feedling in trees adjacent to the highway and flushed when loud pickups drove by. Sounds of other species are audible such as acorn woodpeckers, white-breasted nuthatch, spotted towhee, and juncos. Loud noise from approaching vehicles is also audible. Although I used a dedicated sound recorder and a shotgun microphone to obtain recordings, the calls were loud enough that they could have been recorded with a cell phone or point & shoot camera taking a video.
Technical information
- Recorder
- Sony PCM-M10
- Microphone
- Sennheiser ME67
- Accessories
- Original file size
- 8.02 MB