Tim Melling – Crossbill

Here is a young male Crossbill with a lovely golden colour that superficially looks more like a female.  You can see small patches of the adult male red colouration coming through.  I see Crossbills quite frequently but they are usually high in the trees or flying over, so I was pleased to get this one sitting in the open low down in a conifer.  This one seems to have a rather heavy bill to me, particularly its lower mandible, so if I had taken it in Speyside I might have assumed it was a Scottish Crossbill.  But I photographed him near Holmfirth in West Yorkshire so “Scottish” is out of the question.

Taken with a Nikon D500 and a 300mm f4 lens with a 1.4x converter.  1/3200 second f7.1 ISO 1000  (25 March 2017)

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3 Replies to “Tim Melling – Crossbill”

  1. Who on earth would give this a ‘Thumbs down’? What the heck is there to ‘dislike’?

  2. I think that there is a petty little s*d just going through the posts disliking them. I can only assume they have a liking for guns. Perhaps the initials N.B?

  3. Lovely picture Tim as usual. I have never understood the argument that crossbills are eruptives driven by con failure yet we are supposed to accept that Scottish Crossbill is not. I’m not sure that I do or don’t but it is interesting to contemplate.

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