Tweets,
While no big explosions this year I found Red Crossbills on 3 of
the 5 counts I did. The numbers were 1 on the Toandos Penisula for the
Port Gamble CBC, 6 on the Padilla Bay CBC in the south bayview area and 9
on the Satsop CBC north of Brady. Since I see similar numbers for a block
while doing Breeding Bird Atlasing I think that Red Crossbills are
resident in appropriate areas and seeing small flocks show that there is
food enough to support the resident birds, but does not support evidence
of invasion numbers.
I would be interested to see if Leadbetter Point CBC was the only count to
record White-winged Crossbill this year, if I'm not mistaken wouln't this
be a little below the norm. It seems like in normal years White-wings are
scarce and sporadic much like many of the other northern fiches, but ought
to be seen on a couple of counts.

Scott Downes
sdownes at u.washington.edu
Seattle WA

"Birds don't read bird books. (That's why they are seen doing things they
are not supposed to do)." -Mary Wood


On Tue, 5 Jan 1999 MurrayH at aol.com wrote:

> FYI: We had a flock of about 30 Red Crossbills at the end of Newman Creek
> Road NE of Satsop on the CBC on Jan. 3. We usually hear some here over the
> property in Graham but so far not this winter. And we've only had one lonely
> (?) House Finch for our Backyard Winter Survey!