Behavioral Ecology of Red Crossbills

We hope to better understand red crossbills by asking questions about the environments they choose to live in.

Red crossbills are nomads that travel long distances chasing the resources that sustain them - conifer seed crops.  Our central hypothesis is that nomads experience trade offs between flexibility in the timing of life history events, such as breeding, and compensatory rigidity in other domains, such as diet.

 As nomads that depend on conifer seeds, red crossbills face particularly formidable challenges when locating good places to settle, to live, and to breed in any given year. We conduct field and laboratory studies to determine proximate factors influencing habitat selection at multiple scales. The scope of our questions range in scale from very big (thousands of miles) to very small (a few feet or less) to very tiny (microscopic).

 

Some would call crossbills the dirtbags of the avian world. As such, we the researchers have to be flexible in where we study them. Broadly, our research area encompasses montane conifer forests of the West and Pacific Northwest regions of the United States. Because crossbills follow the conifers crops, from year to year our exact study location changes.

We are currently analyzing data from the 2015 field season, and hope to present our findings at national conferences in the summer of 2016. Please check our Blog to learn of research updates and forthcoming publications!

Want to learn more? Contact Us!

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All images by Victoria A. Cussen, unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved.

 The canopy-access component of our research is generously sponsored by Petzl. Click the logo above to visit their website.

 

The canopy-access component of our research is generously sponsored by Petzl. Click the logo above to visit their website.