On crossbills and finches

I was talking to my mother-in-law on the phone yesterday when I glanced out the back door. Three chubby brown birds with orange-red heads, chests and backs were sitting in my neighbor's small, leafless tree. Redpolls, she said, as I described them.

Carrying on my conversation, I moved to the living room to pick up my Birds of Minnesota Field Guide. Turning to page 76, I ruled the common redpoll out. No, I said, they don't have that much white on them. I returned to the kitchen, book in hand, but the birds had flown.

Maybe they're house finches, I said, thumbing through the red tabbed pages of the book. But these birds looked a lot fatter than the one pictured. Two pages later, I landed on the red crossbill. I declared them thus and finished my conversation.

But as I read more about the red crossbill (Loxia curvirostra), my certainty faltered, especially when I noticed that the map only puts them in our section of Minnesota during winter. I called my layoff buddy, who knows a bit about birds. She and I wavered between house finch and red crossbill. I rued that I hadn't taken better notice of their beaks. I don't always trust those maps, she said, finally. I renewed faith in having seen three red crossbills.

That night my son wanted me to show him all the birds I had seen. (I had told him about how my exercise buddy and I must have gotten too close to a killdeer's nest while we were walking on the Park Point beach that morning.) As I was showing him pictures of killdeer, ring-billed gulls, crows and robins in The Big Golden Book of Backyard Birds, I came across a picture of a house finch. This one was much puffier and looked eerily similar to the red crossbills I'd seen in my backyard.