Friday, 12 October 2012

[Maine-birds] Red Crossbill articles and audio

Matt Young at the Macaulay Library (audio and video archive at Cornell) has written two articles of interest to Maine birders. The first is an excellent and useful online summary of Red Crossbill flight calls, including downloadable samples. This is posted on the eBird web site here:
Matt's other article is published in the latest issue of North American Birds vol. 66, no. 1 (info and subscription link here http://www.aba.org/nab/). Along with David Fifield and William Montevecchi, Matt has put together evidence supporting a distinctive crossbill type that is resident on Newfoundland. This type was previously described but on scant evidence. This recent paper combines morphology and many more recordings to document this declining and isolated population.

Analysis of flight calls is the only reliable way to identify the different types of Red Crossbills, and Matt provides suggestions for how to obtain recordings. He would also happily analyze recordings. One of the irruptive populations, Type 3 from the Pacific Northwest, was recently documented by recordings on Monhegan by Jeremiah Trimble (http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist?subID=S11754403). Type 3 Red Crossbills have a distinctive, almost parrotlet-like call. The other type recently documented on Monhegan is Type 10, which is a type only recently described and still of uncertain distribution (thought to be centered in coastal spruces of the Pacific but also now known to be frequent in the East).

Happy recording of crossbills!

Louis Bevier
Fairfield

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