Эта маленькая птичка семейства вьюрковых очень is unusual. It is a little larger than a sparrow. Females have greenish-gray plumage with yellow specks along the edges of feathers, and males are real beauties: crimson jacket and gray dickey. But crossbills are not interesting with feathers - there are brighter birds. They are distinguished from a number of local pichugs by two factors: the parrots beak and the nesting period. Kids come to them at the end of winter. There were cases when the female sat on eggs in severe cold at –35 ° C. Why crossbred breed chicks in the winter? Let's see.
When cold days come, our forests are empty.Most birds are fed to the south. But some still remain: thrushes, magpies, jackdaws. We think that birds escape from the cold. In fact, they fly after their midge feed. Those birds whose food is made up by the bugs sleeping under the fallen leaves, as well as those who peck dry pods of acacias and seed cones, remain to winter with us. Among these permanent residents of Russia there is a bird klest. With its beak, the ends of which intersect asnippers, he picks out the seeds of cones. A lover of pine nuts and has tenacious paws. They hold on to the branch and hang upside down. Like a parrot, crossbill helps itself with its beak when climbing trees.
But why crossbred breed chicks in the winter, because evenblackbirds and crows bring offspring in the spring, when the cold minutes? In the wild, animals give offspring when fully assured of abundant feed. After all, parents need not only to find food for themselves, but also to raise the young. With what
For laying the female is looking for a place among thick branches.ate. Fluffy crown, powdered with snow, reliably covers it and the young from penetrating cold winds. Only the best heat-insulating materials are used for construction: moss, lichen, feathers and even animal fur. Therefore, bird nests warm and reliable.Chicks are not freezing - because their mother warms them with their warmth. By the way, their beaks are normal at birth - it’s easier for father to stuff crushed seeds into greedy throats. When young shoots turn two months old, their nose starts to bend. Brood learns to get food on their own - good, the seeds of the cones are not all fell out.
However, the question “why crossbreeds chicksin winter ”is not entirely correct: the offspring may appear in summer, especially not far from the field where sunflowers ripen. But in the pirate raids on farmland crossbreeds are not alone, they compete with other birds. But in the period from February to March for them there is expanse. There is only one "but": coniferous fruits every five years. That is why pichugam need to wander. One winter there are many of them in the Moscow region, while the next one is hundreds of kilometers away, in Karelia.
Our "northern parrots" are divided into severalspecies. Sosnovik - the largest, lives in the forests. The elovik is slightly smaller, and the smallest is white-winged crossbill. We have already answered the question of why crossbred breeding chicks in winter, but do you know why they are called “holy birds”? Because their corpses do not decompose, but remain incorruptible, as might, for 20 years. This phenomenon has a simple explanation. A bird in its own way so much resinous substances were piled from coniferous trees that it had already turned into a kind of mummy during its lifetime.
