The Crossbill Story: Part 1 The Early Years
by Tom Hahn
As many of you know, Matt Young is a persuasive guy, and he’s been bugging me for a while to write something “finchy.” So I will – about crossbills, and getting started studying them back in the 1980s, before and shortly after Jeff Groth’s and Craig Benkman’s work began coming out.
I started catching the crossbill bug my first year in graduate school in Seattle. After my masters work on limpet-oystercatcher interactions, I wanted to get more into physiology and behavior, so I moved to the Zoology PhD program at the University of Washington in autumn of 1986, to work with John Wingfield, an environmental endocrinologist who studied birds and had just arrived there himself as a new faculty member. This wasn’t a case of just moving to Washington, seeing crossbills for the first time, and immediately going crazy about them. I recall three crossbill encounters before I started grad school, all memorable but not earth-shaking: 1) Sagehen Creek, north of Truckee, CA, cracking sounds from the trees, seed wings fluttering down, a group pulling seeds from partly open ponderosa cones, 2) Near the Goodwin Lake trailhead in Jackson Hole, WY, brick-red and green birds landing among downed lodgepole logs, gathering grit, 3) Near Gothic, CO, a group fiddling around in a big Engelmann spruce skeleton. So…I basically knew what crossbills were, had seen some, but didn’t know much about them. They did not haunt my dreams.
So….I decided to give crossbills a try. I really had no idea what I was doing when I began trying to “work on” crossbills – how to find them, how to catch them. I could recognize their flight calls, so I was able to detect them, which was a start. I happened on a bunch of them in a big developing Douglas-fir cone crop when I visited Jim Kenagy’s (another of my mentors) Golden-mantled Ground Squirrel field site in July, 1987, near Fish Lake, WA, in the eastern Cascades. On that trip, I managed to make some audio recordings on John Wingfield’s big old reel-to-reel Uher tape recorder (these recordings of Type 4s proved important – a topic for another blather). I encountered a few more later that summer up on San Juan Island, when I was at the Friday Harbor Labs taking my last formal grad school class (Comparative Marine Invertebrate Embryology!). It wasn’t a great Doug-fir cone year on the San Juans, but I found some crossbills at Lime Kiln Point on the west side of the island, and watched them (feeding on Norway Spruce, of all things) while my fellow students ooed and aahed about the Orcas spy-hopping (so they told me) right behind me. John was paying me to band song sparrows around the Friday Harbor Labs while I was taking that class, so my field time was absorbed with that, and there weren’t many crossbills around San Juan Island that summer anyway, so I didn’t start trying to catch crossbills until September when I went back to the east Cascades and Jim Kenagy’s Fish Lake ground squirrel field site with the big Doug-fir crop. It wasn’t until Fall of 1987 when I really got onto the steeply rising part of my crossbill learning curve.
This is just part one of my story, and Matt is trying to convince me to write part two for the next newsletter. If he succeeds, that’ll be about trying to start catching crossbills in the fall of 1987 when I didn’t yet know about the call types, getting my own inkling of a few of those call types, and the lightning bolt of Jeff Groth’s mind-blowing clarification of what I was going to be dealing with if I wanted to study environmental physiology of “the red crossbill.”
Tom Hahn was around when the whole crossbill call type thing started to get off the ground. Tom has now written 5 of these and we will be rolling them out over the next few weeks…..so stay tuned!
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