One of my aims this winter was to find some crossbills; these are birds that I've never seen before but from time to time can be seen locally though I've not managed to see any myself
The earliest opportunity I expected to have was Thursday this week as I generally work Mon - Wed. However, yesterday I was informed that my class bubble at school was having to self isolate for 14 days and I would be working from home, though without the need to completely self isolate as I hadn't been in school at the end of last week.
As a result, I decided to take the opportunity to see if I could find the crossbills at lunch time today. They had been seen in some conifer trees which lined a bridle way leading to a farm, just off the A420. I soon found the location but the only parking I could find was on the opposite side of the road outside a gated entrance so I hoped I wasn't going to upset anyone by parking on their property! Looking down the drive/bridleway I could see a few people with binoculars looking up at one of the trees a 100 yards or so away. On reaching them I found a couple with cameras plus a couple of ladies who told me they lived there and were enjoying all the interest that the birds ' presence had generate!. They also reassured me that it was a public bridleway so we were not trespassing in any way! The crossbills were easy to spot,in branches half way to two thirds the way up the the tree and often at the outer edges although their colours ( red males and green females) blended in quite well with the pine cones and leaves respectively. I was very pleased to spend a while watching them use their specially shaped beaks to extract the seeds from the cones. There were at least half a dozen, maybe quite a lot more, mostly males, (I only spotted one female) On enquiring I learned that the crossbills seemed to have selected that particular tree and were returning to it regularly.
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