Just had an unexpectedly close look at two rather bright-yellow colored Red
Crossbills that suddenly appeared for about 20 seconds atop a tree alongside
our upstairs bedroom window (and about 15 ft away from us at eye-level), as
my wife and I lay in bed having our Sunday morning coffee. What struck me
first was how strikingly bright-yellow they were, vs. the dull reddish or
mixed yellow-red-orange that I've noted before, in the few times that I've
seen them close-up like this. I was also stuck by two other things in quick
order: the prominence of superciliary and submustachial stripes above and
below the eye, and the thickness of the bills. I'm used to seeing such a
prominent (bi-furcated) facial striping pattern in the Purple Finches that
frequent our tubefeeder (which is lower in the same tree), but didn't expect
such a strong facial pattern also in crossbills. The bills were also larger
obviously than those of Purple Finches, but the crossed-tips were also not
as clearly apparent as I would have expected. One of the birds appeared to
be a male (by the amount of yellow dorsally and ventrally); the had less
yellow coloring and seemed to be either an adult female or a subadult male
perhaps--but then they flew off abruptly and I couldn't pursue such details
any further. Beautiful--but it also left me thinking about all the obvious
color and bill variation in these unpredictable nomads (relying on
unpredictable cone crops, etc.).

Bruce Moorhead
Port Angeles, WA
bruceb at olypen.com