Today, thanks to the excellent birding skills of Jacob Drucker which were followed up on by Anders Peltomaa, many NYC birders got to enjoy a flock of Red Crossbills in Central Park. The light made photographing them tough, but it was enjoyable to watch them. The Red Crossbills are a new bird for my life list.
The video has regular and slow motion clips of the Red Crossbills extracting seeds for cones. The Red Crossbills were identified as the Type 3 subspecies using recordings made by Anders Peltomaa, by Matthew Young and Andrew Farnsworth, the flight-call-wizards of Cornell Lab of Ornithology. This subspecies specializes in smaller and softer cones from trees such as Spruce, Fir and Hemlock.