Crossbill
Taking a break from my Baja uploads, here's a female Crossbill that I took today not far from home. The upper mandible is fixed centrally but the lower mandible can swing to the left or right, and this one swings to the right, and is known as a dextral (left swingers are known as sinistrals). The Scientific name is Loxia curvirostra. Loxia means oblique or crosswise, and curvirostra means curved beak. The name Crossbill was seemingly first used by John Ray in 1678, when he called it the "Shell-apple or Cross-bill". Although Walter Charleston ten years earlier (1668) called it Cross-beak. And Christopher Merrett, who published a nature book eleven years before Ray in 1667 only used the name Shell-apple, apparently from its habit of occasionally turning up during irruptions from Scandinavia and smashing up apples to get at the pips. I have never heard of Crossbills doing this but it is worth remembering there would be scarcely any conifers away from north Scotland during the seventeenth century. So irruptive birds were probably starving, having already left Scandinavia because of a failed cone crop.
Crossbill
Taking a break from my Baja uploads, here's a female Crossbill that I took today not far from home. The upper mandible is fixed centrally but the lower mandible can swing to the left or right, and this one swings to the right, and is known as a dextral (left swingers are known as sinistrals). The Scientific name is Loxia curvirostra. Loxia means oblique or crosswise, and curvirostra means curved beak. The name Crossbill was seemingly first used by John Ray in 1678, when he called it the "Shell-apple or Cross-bill". Although Walter Charleston ten years earlier (1668) called it Cross-beak. And Christopher Merrett, who published a nature book eleven years before Ray in 1667 only used the name Shell-apple, apparently from its habit of occasionally turning up during irruptions from Scandinavia and smashing up apples to get at the pips. I have never heard of Crossbills doing this but it is worth remembering there would be scarcely any conifers away from north Scotland during the seventeenth century. So irruptive birds were probably starving, having already left Scandinavia because of a failed cone crop.