Last weekend while birding the high elevation Blue Mt. area in southeast
Washington and then stopping by Robinson Canyon west of Ellensburg I noticed
the calls of the Red Crossbills to be different. The Red Crossbills in the
Blue Mountains were in sub-alpine firs and larches and did not have as loud
and distinct kip---kip call note(s) as that in Robinson Canyon. Here in
Gold Bar they sound like the ones in Robinson and yet Gold Bar has Douglas
Firs to feed in and Robinson has lots of Ponderosa Pines. Of the 8+ types
of which over half have been recorded in Washington State it would be nice
to start labeling these odd sounding Red Crossbills. Again we need a tape
as Wayne Weber talked about. When these are split into species ranks I can
see lots of mistakes about ready to happen just because we aren't ready to
really knowing how to tell them apart. Perhaps we 'all' need song-a-gram
machines.

Ken Knittle, Gold Bar, WA, xenops at msn.com